Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Their screams were short and sharp and suddenly ended. The screaming of the bull crashed like a tidal wave against the columns and resonated in Andrion’s head. Sumitra, with a short cry, turned her face into Andrion’s chest. The temple shuddered.

  Gard blanched and hid his face. Gods, Andrion wailed, what kind of parents would force a child to witness this savagery? Chrysais stroked Gard’s hair absently, sadly, knowing she could not soothe him.

  The troupe of dancers whirled. The bull stamped, head lowered, great shoulders hunched. Someone ran forward and seized the horns. The animal convulsed. A slender body flew through the air and struck the floor with the terrible moist sound of a melon cleaved in two. The others seemed not to notice, continuing to weave patterns about the huge bull, the embodiment of Taurmenios, the embodiment of the madness of Minras… . Another leaped, seized the horns, flipped and landed upon the animal’s back. Again the bull contorted itself; the acrobat slipped, fell, and was trampled.

  Prisoners given a chance for reprieve? Andrion wondered, his head spinning. Children dancing into the afterlife, believing that this ghastly spectacle pleased the gods? But then, it certainly pleased Tenebrio. His stomach heaved, and he closed his throat on bile and outraged cry both. He clutched Sumitra even more closely against his chest.

  The dancers twirled and gestured, throwing each other toward the bull. Andrion blinked, looked again; still the forms darted through the moonlight like silvery flying fish skimming the ocean waves. They flashed, and the horns flashed, and the smooth and graceful limbs became ugly dark-mottled meat upon the implacable stone.

  They were all gone. A low, predatory murmur came from the crowd, the dark god not yet satiated. Eldrafel’s tongue passed lovingly between his lips. He stepped over the mangled bodies toward the bull. Its chest heaved, its horns sagged; then, crazed by the sickly sweet scent of blood, it charged again. Oblivious to and yet preeningly aware of the watching eyes, he seized the bull’s horns just as their red, razor-sharp tips touched his chest. The bull jerked its head up. Eldrafel rode the horns, his body curving into a somersault, landed on the bull’s broad back and somersaulted again. He leaped with infernal grace to the stone floor, not even out of breath. Exalted by sorcery and death, he laughed. His upraised hands were stained with blood.

  “Khalingu!” exclaimed Tembujin. “He really did that!”

  That was what all the acrobats were to have done, Andrion realized. But they were mortals, not demons. Mortals whose sensibilities had been long eroded by the lurking evil of this place. His spine contracted, his body trembled, and sternly he quelled the weakness of his own flesh.

  A mob of priests and soldiers rushed forward. Obsidian and bronze winked. The bull’s bellows ceased abruptly. A pool of dark carnelian spread bubbling and seething across the stones.

  The music stopped. The frieze of watchers shattered. Robed figures swarmed, bathing in the blood of man and bull like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Andrion’s appalled eyes recognized Rue, her hands and cheeks matted red, her curious liquid eyes swirling with an uncertainty only heightened by drink and hysteria. She plucked at the elegant figure of Eldrafel, pleading, perhaps, for some reassurance. Mockingly he fondled her and wiped his hands on her robe.

  Chrysais lay back on the cold lap of her throne, eyes closed. Gard huddled on his stool. From the spilled blood rose a mist, tentative at first, then thickening into a frost-faceted veil. The reek of sorcery intensified until Andrion choked on it. The moon was as sickly as Sumitra’s face, which peered up at him—I am frightened, forgive me… . We are all frightened, he told her silently.

  They stepped back, away from the gasping, heaving mass of bodies. Sharp if somewhat wobbly points pricked them back onto the dais. Defiantly Andrion dashed the amaranth crowns to the floor. The petals shattered, skittering across the stone like beads from a broken necklace. The drunken, distracted guards did not protest. Andrion’s brow tingled as if touched by the diadem.

  Eldrafel turned. One gesture sent the robed figures scurrying back to their places on the rim of the basin, like columns amid the eddies of mist, now concealed, now revealed. Their eyes burned red as the eyes of hunting wolves. Another chant began, quick guttural words like racing heartbeats vibrating in the belly of the mountain.

  Several guards dragged the pitiful remains of men and beast to the edge of the abyss and threw them in. A light flickered in the depths to receive them, not pale, like that of the frozen moon, but a florid luminescence that welled upward and tinted pink the drifting coils of mist.

  Eldrafel danced along the edge of the cleft and across the narrow bridge, leaning perilously far, pulling back. The mist grew opaque, becoming smoke lit from beneath by tongues of sullen flame. And yet the air remained stiflingly cold.

  Eldrafel leaped onto the dais, his eyes mirroring the crawling scarlet light of the chasm, grinning in an ecstasy of evil. Tembujin’s glance darted from abyss to Eldrafel and back. He frowned.

  “Now it is your turn,” Eldrafel said. “Tied and torn and cast into the depths; I shall give you a few more moments to anticipate.” He pulled Sumitra close and planted a lingering kiss upon her mouth; before she could react, he released her and kissed Andrion as well. His body stank of rich unguents and sorcery, but not, despite his exertions, of sweat.

  Sumi spat, as Dana had spat out the poison drink, her face convulsed with disgust. Andrion’s lips burned, violated by venom. With a furious snarl he wiped his mouth on his hand and struck out, but Eldrafel, unperturbed, had already pirouetted away.

  To where two waiting figures held a linen-wrapped bundle. Eldrafel pulled the cloth away. He raised high the shield of Sabazel and its consort, the sword Solifrax. They glimmered faintly, not reflecting the ghastly light of the sky or the bloody light of the depths, but for just a moment gleaming with the radiance of a free sun and moon. Then they faded into dull lumps of metal.

  Andrion quivered as if his own body were transfixed by the sword. Behind him Dana emitted a low cry of rage and despair. In Eldrafel’s hands the joined weapons were an image of sexual brutality, their purposes mocked, Andrion’s love for Sabazel blasphemed.

  And yet, Andrion told himself, forcing a breath from the suffocating air, leaning forward like a runner before a race, and yet he was almost relieved to see the two so combined. Now he understood the odd unity he felt with Dana. Now he understood what it was he could, he must do.

  Flames leaped from the chasm, casting fantastic shadows across the temple. Eldrafel laid the shield and sword at Chrysais’s feet, responding to her outstretched hand with a bow so exquisitely courteous it was a jeer. He turned and began to dance again with his wraiths of smoke and sorcery. The chant swelled; the mountain festered with it, lurched and spun like a whirlpool around the solitary figure that danced a litany to a dark god.

  Andrion held Sumitra. Dana’s hand pressed into his back. Tembujin at his left muttered, “I can tell what it is he intends us to see, and yet I can see that it is not there. No flame, no smoke, just the dark chasm and a few strands of mist like will-o’-the-wisps.”

  “Thank you,” Andrion said. If Tembujin could not be sucked into hallucination, then neither would he. His mind danced, each thought, each sight, each scent a crystalline bubble prismed with implication. Wonderful, he told himself, how peril concentrates thought. His necklace purred agreement.

  His companions were profiles chased one after the other upon frozen moonlight and lurid flame; Dana an edged weapon, Sumitra a newly minted coin, Tembujin an exotic and yet familiar statue. Silver-rimed faces, too precious to waste on the sickly paradoxes of Minras.

  Sumitra, he told himself, has been bait to draw me here. If I were not here, she would be bait again. Dana and Tembujin only become lesser rulers when I am here as a greater one. Eldrafel can only use them as threads in his evil tapestry when I am his needle. One chance, all I need is one chance to kill him—I, too, am corrupted, he thought, writhing, wanting to so cold-bloodedly kill!

  Andrion looked
again at Gard’s ashen face. And Eldrafel needs him, too, for now; but the time will come when Gard dies of some mysterious disease … I must save the boy, I must commit him to saving himself by giving him the chance to refuse corruption.

  The sword and shield lay on the floor by Chrysais’s feet. By Gard’s. Eldrafel could not turn the weapons to his own use, but he could flaunt them, denying their power to those people to whom they were so much more than weapons. Such appalling profanation would win battles more handily than if he did control the power of shield and sword.

  Eldrafel, self-absorbed, pranced along the rim of the abyss, across the bridge, back again. Chrysais’s features were blotched clay, resenting the satiety she had craved. Several priests, armed with daggers and ropes, stepped toward the dais. The chanting reverberated in succeeding waves through the rock, echoing upon itself.

  Gard looked up, summoned by Andrion’s fierce resolve. And his face ignited to his uncle’s command. Andrion tore the necklace from his throat and pressed it into Dana’s hand. “Ah!” she gasped, as if he had struck her in the stomach. But that link between them tautened and held. “Andrion!” Sumitra wailed. Dana seized her shoulders, holding her back from following as Andrion leaped from the dais.

  Gard jumped from his stool, at last unleashed. He swept up the sword and shield and almost dropped them, startled by their weight. The priests shouted. Eldrafel stopped in mid-gesture, limbs held in elegant angles, head tilted.

  Gard threw the weapons. They flashed, frost and fire mated, and Andrion picked them effortlessly from the air. His hand fit the hilt of Solifrax; Daimion’s sword, Bellasteros’s sword, his own sword that he had won; smoothly he pulled it free of the shield. Chiming, the silver metal of the shield flowed together and the wound in the star healed itself.

  Sword and shield rang as one, a long sustained note like a plucked string of the zamtak. The sound was not loud but incisive, cutting the chant in mid-phrase and shivering on through the sudden silence. The smoke wraiths fled. The watchers drew back. Chrysais jerked erect, her mask thinning suddenly to reveal—not quite relief, not quite disappointment.

  Gard’s laugh of delight, pure and unaffected, cleared the miasma of sorcery as surely as did the ring of the shield.

  Andrion set the shield upon his own arm. It was strangely light, carrying itself, permitting him only to guide it. Its emblazoned star pulsed, reflecting the clear radiance of the sword and doubling it. But the odd unity with Dana continued, no longer uncomfortable but as easy as the curve of the shield fitting the curve of the sword.

  The watchers huddled with tiny gibbering noises, their eyes not feral gleams but moist drunken blurs. Guards gestured ineffectually around the dais. Cold flame licked the rim of the chasm. The spinning world halted abruptly and even the bleak face of the moon steadied.

  Dana clutched the necklace to her breast. Did she cry aloud, or was it only a tendril of her thought that lashed Andrion’s mind like a whip: My shield, by Ashtar, my shield; gods, what other man save him can raise my shield!

  Sumitra stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, her great brown eyes glistening with shock. By all the gods, Andrion howled silently, Sumi, I cannot leave you—I must leave you—I vow in the name of Harus, of Ashtar, I shall return for you and for our child and for the Empire that is mine!

  Tembujin twitched as if he meant to leap forward and help Andrion; the guards seethed clumsily around him, Sumitra swayed, and he grasped her instead. Andrion could sense his-thought, too; do something, you idiot, before someone realizes they can threaten us and force you to disarm!

  Eldrafel stood before him, his lips drawn back in a snarl, his teeth glinting like ice pearls. He raised his hands and a sudden force like a blast of black fire lanced through the mist. But Andrion was expecting that. The shield leaped up, turning the blast with another ring. Did the demon priest’s perfect features warp with surprise? Good. Very good.

  Andrion edged to the side, toward the abyss and its gelid flame. Illusion, he reminded himself. The fire is illusion. My mother once told me of a fiery chasm and how her shield protected her.

  Eldrafel spun about to see Gard’s small fists gesturing triumphantly. The priest hissed like a striking cobra and slapped the boy sprawling.

  Chrysais jumped from the throne, stumbled, swept Gard into her arms. Her face was hidden in his hair; his face, a pale oval smeared with blood from a cut lip, stared up at Eldrafel in unalloyed hatred.

  Andrion winced. But perhaps it was just as well for the boy to realize he did not watch an impersonal melodrama.

  Eldrafel was upon him again, hands raised. At last! Andrion lunged for his heart, Solifrax slicing a shining arc through the smoke. But the blade turned suddenly, twisting in Andrion’s hand as if meeting some resistance thicker than flesh, and slipped along Eldrafel’s ribs leaving a gory but shallow wound. Hellfrost and damnation, is the man invulnerable!

  The shield emitted a shower of light. Eldrafel’s upraised hands remained empty. His face opened in amazement. His chest was streaked with blood, slow ruby drops oozing over the smooth beauty of his abdomen; good, Andrion thought, you can bleed, you bastard!

  It was Andrion who grinned now, in a fierce joy. He stepped backward, without any grace whatsoever but with a great deal of caution, onto the narrow bridge. Fire licked at his feet, but he felt no heat, only a chill breath from the abyss. And what was down there? The corridors of Mount Tenebrio were as tangled as those of the palace in Orocastria. The mountain, too, must have a basement. If not, Andrion thought with a shuddering sigh, I die on my own terms, with the symbols of Empire and Sabazel in my hands.

  Suddenly, in answer, a wind pealed down from the indigo-dark vaults of the sky. The moon spun amid clouds of star-stuff. The shield and sword blazed with an unsullied white light.

  Eldrafel stepped onto the end of the bridge. The black force lanced out again. Again Andrion turned the blast, this time back into the priest’s face. Like an ugly sea creature hidden in the heart of a gleaming nautilus shell, something moved behind Eldrafel’s gold and marble facade, some vile inhuman shadow.

  Andrion blinked. The vision vanished as fast as it had formed. Eldrafel glared at him, spitting curses, his clear gray eyes mottled with flecks of vermilion, his hair knotted by the wind.

  With one last desperate glance at the three moon-gilt figures on the dais, Andrion stepped off the bridge. The light of sword and shield bore him up and the wind sustained him, so that he floated into the red depths as light as a falcon’s feather. Was it blood that rushed in his head, or the flutter of wings? Whichever, the flames of illusion parted before him.

  “Gods,” he muttered between teeth locked in a spasm of courage and fear, “gods, make sport of me if you will, but protect mine!” The pale mark of the necklace on his throat throbbed.

  A sound like the howling of jackals eddied down the cleft. “Throw them all in!” shouted Eldrafel, his voice no longer melodious but burred with fury.

  Chrysais’s bitter scream was louder. “No, we must keep them to draw him back!”

  “This insult to Tenebrio must be avenged!”

  Chrysais laughed, high and shrill, flirting with hysteria. “Tenebrio has tasted your blood tonight, my king; yours and this your son and heir’s. That will sate him for now.”

  And Gard’s wail pierced the darkness, “His son? His?” The hatred in his voice rusted into anguish.

  The wind died. The voices faded. Andrion was surrounded by hollow silence. The flames shredded into nothingness, consumed by a cerulean twilight that was neither light nor dark, neither victory nor defeat, but continued struggle… . He was floating, he realized. He could not really float.

  In that moment of doubt stone came up to meet him and struck him senseless.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As soon as the door shut behind him, Eldrafel seized a water pitcher and dashed it against the wall. The smash, and the clattering rain of shards, was not enough to restore the shine to his tarnished features. He pr
oceeded methodically to destroy every breakable object in the chamber.

  Chrysais stood flat against the wall. Her dress was smeared with blood from Gard’s lip, her chin quivered from his agony. He had thrust her away from him, calling her names he should have been too young to know.

  She had left the sobbing boy with a Rue so subdued as to be stupefied. Now Chrysais’s hands clutched only at the sardonyx figurine choked between her breasts. She watched her husband’s rage with bleak, dry eyes. If his fury had not been so cold and silent she might have screamed at him, berating him for botching the sacrifice, or wept in anger at their plan going so wrong. But before this supernal rage she could only wait.

  Her various pots of paint and perfume left fragrant multicolored blotches upon the floor. A wine carafe splattered crimson across an old tapestry, blotting the writhing figures in a tide of blood. The images on the new, incomplete tapestry seemed to dance mockingly.

  Eldrafel stood breathing hard, lip curled in scorn, watching it. Only the images of sword and shield stood out clearly from the canvas, their stitches winking to each other. With a growl Eldrafel picked up a long needle and thrust it through the picture of the shield as Solifrax had so lately penetrated the real object. But the silvery twinkle, as of distant laughter, did not abate.

  Chrysais said dully, “We cannot enspell either sword or shield. I doubt if we can enspell Andrion or any of his minions. They are strong, much stronger than we thought.”

  “Than we thought?” Eldrafel mimicked. “Speak for yourself, woman; it is your powers that have been defeated, not mine.”

  “Defeated?” replied Chrysais. Her face began to crumple, the mask slipping. “We are not defeated. Andrion lives, yes; the shine in those images proves that, if nothing else. But we have the others, and he will come for them. He must.”

  “Then he must come to Orocastria,” Eldrafel snapped. “Tenebrio did not receive his sacrifice. His full sacrifice,” he amended, glancing with distaste at the gruesome furrow Solifrax had sliced in his own flesh. “And now the full moon is setting; the proper time is passed. Taurmenios now must receive his due, at his festival in the dark of the moon. He has been restive lately.”