Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Eldrafel’s brows tilted in salty amusement. “Yes, I daresay you would, indulging your petty jealousies and ruining a greater plan.”

  Chrysais flushed and drank again. Eldrafel rose from the bed, began to pace across the floor, caught himself and changed his gait to a negligent saunter. He lifted an odd-shaped object from beneath a particularly dark and moldy tapestry.

  Chrysais closed her eyes and then opened them again, as if hoping the object would change shape. It did not, even as Eldrafel held it at arm’s length and turned it around and around, his bland expression tightening for a moment into puzzled resentment.

  The shield of Sabazel, held on Dana’s arm as she fell, had struck fallen Solifrax with such supernal force that the sword had been driven right through it. The crystalline crescent of the blade cleft the embossed silver star in perversion of Andrion’s necklace. Blade and star alike pulsed with luminescence like a slow seeping of power. Or perhaps it was a burgeoning, the strengths of shield and sword combining in wary truce.

  Eldrafel laid the bizarrely mated objects on the bed, set his foot on the rim of the shield, and pulled at the sword’s hilt until his gilded features purpled. But Solifrax did not move.

  Eldrafel released it with an oath. The flesh of his palms, delicate vellum, were seared scarlet by a deeper cold than their own. For a moment he stood regarding the joined weapons, smiling narrow-eyed in an expression that in anyone else would have been an angry frown. Then he said, his voice coated with hoarfrost, “So, they shall serve as they are, an offering to Tenebrio and evidence of our power. It is no great matter.”

  The lamp flickered in a brief, musky breeze. Chrysais’s painted face was suddenly featureless, her eyes hollow. But Eldrafel’s mother-of-pearl radiance was undimmed. She reached for him, hand open like a penitent before a shrine.

  He looked her up and down. His fingertips explored her chin, her breast, her belly, not in a caress but in dispassionate evaluation; “Ah, my dear,” he murmured, “you know that the high priest must abstain from carnal contact before the blood rite of Tenebrio. As the king must now greet the dawn from the upper temple, and as you have your role to play later.”

  “Yes,” she responded dully. And stood dully while he threw his lustrous purple cloak over his shoulders and glided from the room.

  Again her teeth pressed into her lip, so far that the red paint deepened with blood. Her slightly unfocused eyes ranged around the room, regarding each tapestry, new and old, groping for counsel. She set the cup down with a crash and watched with interest as the wine splashed onto the tabletop. But neither did the crimson stains hold a message.

  With a smile uneasily mingled of wistfulness and lust, Chrysais sat down on the bed and began to stroke the sword, up and down, as if it were a man to be aroused.

  *

  Andrion’s sleep was tossed on the horns of uncertainty. The capture among the sorcery-clotted ruins had not fulfilled his sense of foreboding, it had increased it. The bated breath of Minras had yet to expel itself in that ultimate scream of horror, sigh of defeat, shout of triumph … He wanted to writhe among the bedclothes. But Sumitra lay beside him in a tranquil sleep, her lips curved gently with the beauty of her compassion.

  The darkness ebbed; beyond these thick walls dawn crept across the sky like a blush up Sumi’s cheeks. Andrion dozed and woke, his senses rippling with a faint but undeniable awareness, like a distant sound that is overlaid with the noises of the day and only becomes apparent in the depth of the night when all else is silent. He felt Dana’s body touching him, enclosing him, nourishing him even as he fed her… . This was embarrassing.

  He tried to quell the sensation; wrong time, wrong place, wrong woman, by the tailfeathers of the god! But he was stirred not by lust but by an ineffable awareness of unity, as though his necklace had transformed itself from symbol to reality. And yet something about that unity disturbed him. The moon and the star existed side by side, not in one.

  Andrion kissed Sumi very gently, not wanting to wake her. He rose, shaved, and dressed in a clean kilt and cloak. He found Dana staring out the tiny window toward a sky inspiringly clean of soot, the infinite azure of Ashtar’s eyes restored. It was, it seemed, early afternoon.

  “I could perhaps squeeze through the window,” Dana said in greeting.

  He laid his hand on her shoulder, where the sinews sang like the strings of Sumitra’s zamtak. “And do what? They have taken even your dagger. No, we must wait, playing dumb, storing our defiance until it can be used to best effect.”

  She laid her hand on his, allowing him an affectionate if exasperated smile. The touch acknowledged that odd congruence of sensation without exploring it. “These rites,” she began. “I would expect any rites committed here to be as dark and twisted as the place.”

  “True … “A guard opened the door. Andrion noted three others outside; if they managed somehow to overcome those four, he wondered vaguely, would eight guards appear next time?

  It was he who was summoned, and separated from his companions. He managed to counter Dana’s frown with a brisk nod toward the omen of the sky. Setting his jaw, glancing reluctantly toward sleeping Sumitra, he followed the soldier.

  The rough-hewn corridors twisted and turned past dark niches, shadowy stairways, and bolted doors. Andrion could imagine the creatures lurking behind those doors, but chose not to. The air itself was volatile with a chill sentience that yearned to escape the confining stone and flood the sky, extinguishing the sun.

  Andrion was thrust into a room and the door slammed behind him. The light leaking through the interstices of a large filigree lamp illuminated luxurious if somewhat decayed furnishings. Dingy tapestries, their stitched scenes skewed just enough from reality to be nightmarish, undulated along the walls. A tiny pot of incense—no, by Harus, of lethenderum—burned on a table, valiantly attempting to dispel the pervading scent of rot. His muscles tightened into a sustained shiver, and when a shape moved in an alcove, he crouched.

  It took him a moment to recognize Chrysais. She wore a simple linen gown almost like a shroud, swathing her body from throat to ankle and masking its lushness. But her face was unmasked, pale and strangely indeterminate without its paint and powder. Her hair hung loose down her back. She assumed an attitude of tipsy flirtatiousness, and said, “Welcome, little brother. Or is it half-brother?”

  “Half-brother,” Andrion responded. Well, he thought, she is certainly never boring. She extended her hand. Her fingers were red and swollen around the scab of what looked like a knife cut. He cultivated a mote of sympathy, bowed and gallantly kissed the proffered hand.

  She inhaled, sharp and shuddering, as if he had made a much more intimate gesture. He started back. Already the lethenderum was distorting his senses, as if his senses had not burden enough. Dana, he thought, a reluctant bud flowering in season; Sumitra, shy discretion, a bloom plucked and cherished; Chrysais—Chrysais was all bold subtleties.

  Her lashes fluttered, butterflies swooping around the shining blue-violet pools of her upturned eyes, luscious, lustrous drowned eyes. Her hand splayed against his chest, just below the arc of the necklace. Her flesh was hot. The necklace hissed.

  So, Andrion wheezed. She had searched her sexual arsenal for whatever blandishments would tempt him and had come close to the answer; not blatant eroticism, but vulnerability. And yet her vulnerability, unlike Sumi’s, unlike Dana’s, was not edged by strength; even the challenging sexual sting he had felt so clearly at their first meeting had been blunted.

  “Do you set the price of my freedom?” he asked. “Or is this, too, simply part of Eldrafel’s plot?” It would be funny, in a mordant way, if it were not so repellent. Repellent because, damn the lethenderum and his own importunate body, she was tempting him.

  But Eldrafel’s name took her aback. She faltered. Andrion wrenched himself from the creeping tendrils of her fingers and saw behind her, filling the alcove, a tapestry with colors as raw as fresh meat. It had to be the one Dana and Tembujin
had found. The ship, Bonifacio, Niarkos, Sumitra laid across the shield in the ancient temple where she had led them; his gorge rose and his heart hardened.

  Chrysais followed the direction of his gaze and raised her chin in arrogant modesty. “Evidence of my power,” she murmured.

  As one can see the vanished beauty in an old woman, something in the line of the cheekbone or the tilt of the head, so Andrion saw suddenly the crone implicit in the sag of Chrysais’s cheek and the fragile skin around her eyes. The power that has drained you? he asked silently.

  His thoughts wriggled in his grasp. He straightened, folded his hands behind his back and said sternly, before either his sister or his body distracted him again, “I hear that the royal line of Minras suffers from sterility. Perhaps their god is failing.”

  “Failing? How little you know of the special favor granted to us.”

  She said “us,” he noted. “How the god Tenebrio visits the barren wife and fills her?”

  Chrysais flushed mauve. “Rue, that blabbering wench.”

  “It sounds quite distasteful to me,” Andrion said. His veering thought reminded him that Bellasteros had supposedly been sired by a god—under the purity of the Sabazian moon, he asserted, not in these ugly, unhealthy passages; summer king, winter king, and the natural cycles of the world… .

  “How would you know?” Chrysais retorted. “The touch of a god is—is like standing unburnt in the midst of a bonfire.” The mauve faded to an attractive pink. “Proserfina could not bear the intensity of such a touch, and died at Eldrafel’s birth. I not only bore it, I gloried in it!” Her eyes gleamed, but her lips crimped defensively. If she had private knowledge, it both elated and disturbed her.

  Proserfina, Andrion thought. If she had died so young, how could she have known what her son would become? But if she did not know, why did she haunt these dim galleries, gnawed by horror?

  His thought raveled, and as he grasped at it, suddenly knotted. Gray eyes, mirrored with perception. “The god in the person of a man?” he asked. “Was Gard fathered by Tenebrio or by his high priest, Eldrafel?”

  Chrysais deflated so abruptly, her features blanched so white, that he thought she was going to faint. He took her shoulders and set her an arm’s length away on the bed. “The priest is transformed by the god,” she recited. “The priest becomes the god.”

  So it was true. Please, do not let the boy discover it too soon. “Tell me,” Andrion demanded.

  “What could I have done?” she began. “Go home to the god-king Bellasteros, whining that I hated my husband? Oh, Gath would have sent me back, dishonored, if I had not had his son; I could not have borne that. So I agreed to visit Tenebrio.”

  “Bellasteros would not have scorned you for returning.”

  “Would he not?” Chrysais drew herself up and fixed Andrion with an acrid glare. “He put aside my mother in favor of that Sabazian whore—”

  “My mother,” stated Andrion, but she paid no attention.

  “He cared nothing of real women, only of those trousered hellions.”

  “Who are free to take or reject a man as they choose?”

  Her mouth twisted, but she would not take the bait. “I learned here what a woman has for power. And I helped Gath, oh yes, for his power was mine. I won for him the fealty of the far sea, first with my charm, then with my herbs. I knew many men, but I found none I could … respect. Who would respect me.”

  Andrion had to listen intently to understand her words, her body spoke so much more urgently. Even without her cosmetic weaponry, Chrysais’s flesh was rich enough to pour, her manner experienced to the point of jaded. She leaned toward him, face upturned, lips parted and moist, a lodestone turning ineluctably to the north, any north at hand. Power indeed, burbled Andrion’s careening mind. Voluptuousness as power. It must have been the disorienting effect of the lethenderum that made him shove her gently away instead of throwing her down.

  “Eldrafel was only a child when I came to Minras,” continued Chrysais. “I saw him now and then; he was almost as bright and handsome as Gard. But that day I came here to Tenebrio to prepare for the rite, I saw him as a man.

  “Supposedly it is the supplicant’s husband who impersonates the god. But this time …” She chuckled huskily. “We gave Gath an elixir of hemp and spiced honey, so that he dreamed he was with me. But he was not.”

  Her eyes, soft-focused with lethenderum, seemed to see some distant romance. Romance only in retrospect, idealized by the veil of time and self-deception. She draped herself over Andrion like a soft fur, and again he removed her, somewhat less gently this time. Her lotus scent mingled with that of the lethenderum, and the blood pounding in his head dizzied him.

  “Of course,” she continued, her sultry voice crisping, “I could not hide that I had indeed met a god. But Gath had none of Eldrafel’s style. When he suspected how matters truly lay, he moved against us, direct but clumsy, as was his manner. We moved first.”

  Andrion felt a sneaking sympathy for Gath, hopelessly outclassed by the deviousness of Chrysais and Eldrafel and their innumerable spies. “What happened?” he prompted, remembering only too well Gard’s account of his … mother’s husband’s death.

  “The time had not yet come for Gath’s death ritual,” said Chrysais dreamily. “The moon must dance along the tops of the columns, you see, stirring the shadows in the temple, or Tenebrio cannot drink the blood we give him, and with it nourish the soil.”

  Andrion shuddered. Shapes moved in the cellars of his mind—the dark god drinking and then excreting blood—a horned figure dancing on stone walls … He chased the images, but they eluded him.

  “So we staged a ritual of our own. We fed him ergot, and when he went mad from it, screaming that his flesh was burning, we led him to the bath. It is easy, really, to drown in a bath when careless. Only a few servants were executed for overheating the water.” She drooped against Andrion’s side, eyes closed, mouth slack, her lips in repose curving sadly down. “Ah, Eldrafel,” she sighed.

  Was she remorseful? Andrion wondered. Or merely tired? At least she did not gloat, as Eldrafel no doubt did, over their crimes. As Gath had. Her pride had worn thin indeed, to lead her to talk so freely. Or else, he reflected in a moment of cold reason, with the fulfillment of the plot it no longer mattered what he knew. He was here, they had wanted him here… .

  He could not hate her. He hated the men who had corrupted her, Gath and then Eldrafel, even as he knew she had allowed herself to be corrupted.

  And suddenly, like a great reptile surging up from the depths of a swamp, the memory struck him. The cavern, damn it, the pictures on the wall of the cavern, Ashtar’s shrine in Sabazel; a clean, blue cave, sacred, not profane like this place that fostered the darker passions.

  With an effort he seized the idea before it spun away. The death ritual of the king, the sacrifice that won the health of his land. An ancient custom no longer followed in Sabazel or Sardis or the Empire, thank the beneficent gods. And yet, he asked himself giddily, are those not the same gods who once demanded my death in place of Bellasteros’s, and at last demanded his death in place of mine?

  An ancient custom still observed on Minras, under the eye of gods who amused themselves by moving kings and queens upon the game board and then devouring them …

  Chrysais’s fingertips crept up the inside of Andrion’s thigh, and he gasped. Rationality frayed. The tapestries waved, liquid rather than cloth, the lamp spun and emitted a trail of sparks, the windows winked and leered.

  Chrysais entangled him, pulling him down into a miasma of lotus and sweat. He had just enough sense to be grateful for the layers of cloth crumpled between their bodies. Her lips moved against his—yes, he had been right about the taste of her mouth, sweet wine with an aftertaste of vinegar.

  He wrenched himself away, muttering, “By all that is holy, woman!” But even the definition of holy was worn thin. His addled senses left him lying between her linen-wrapped legs, the heat of her body drawi
ng him like a moth to the flame. Gods, even his body used, abused, violated… .

  But she did not pluck at his clothing. She clutched him like a child, her erotic lures suddenly irrelevant. Her voice pleaded, very nearly sobbing, “Love me, love me, love me.”

  What? This plea was not at all what he expected. Andrion froze, his heart pierced by an exquisite pity. How could Chryse and Bellasteros, who had raised Andrion and Sarasvati with strength and humor and understanding, have failed so utterly with this child of their adolescence? But how could he condemn them for the choices she had made?

  “Please, love me,” her breath shuddered in his ear.

  He rocked her in his arms, murmuring distracted endearments, as the room stuttered and demon images clambered down from the tapestries and danced. As the door opened and Eldrafel led in a procession of dark-robed figures.

  Andrion struggled for coherence. Would they accuse him of rape or incest? But no, that was much too easy, for the warp of the tapestry was only loose threads without the binding weft… .

  The soft bed and Chrysais’s billowing body fell away. Andrion reeled. Supported between two priests, bracketed by their black and glittering obsidian knives, he saw only Chrysais’s eyes flood with tears.

  “Forgive me,” she said, seizing some last thread of composure from her lethenderum-laced snarl of truth and falsehood. “You see, Eldrafel could not die as king, for he is high priest and must perform the ceremony …” Her words drifted away in an attenuated sigh.

  Even now he could not hate her. Even as his mind coagulated and he remembered that according to the ancient traditions the king must come freely to the place of his death. And he, more a king than Eldrafel could ever be, had indeed come freely to the bowels of Tenebrio—too innocent, or too civilized, or simply too stupid to realize what he was doing—manipulated, god’s beak, manipulated!

  Eldrafel’s smirk he expected. It was Chrysais’s naked face, turned up to her husband, begging for the love his evil perfection could not comprehend, that seared away Andrion’s inebriation, that stiffened his spine and led him to lead his own escort out the door.