Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  He winked, an affable conspirator, and with a rush of wings he was gone. Andrion stared open-mouthed into a cavern that now seemed doubly dim and empty. The mark of the god’s lips on his forehead burned like a brand. “But I had more questions,” he said lamely. “The history of Sardis, the borders of Sabazel, intent and belief and reason …”

  Surely a god should manifest himself in a glory of trumpets and incense. How could the fierce falcon god be so ordinary? Had the god diminished his power to fit Andrion’s limited perceptions?

  Or had Andrion, floundering upon this shore between dream and reality, created the entire scene? In his desperation he had gone so far as to claim descent from a god, even as the god’s mundane appearance only proved the poverty of his imagination… . And yet Harus had worn the numinous cloak Bellasteros had worn, which Andrion at times felt draped over his own shoulders.

  “But you probably would not answer those questions either!” he called. “That would be much too easy!” His voice reverberated into the distance. Perhaps he caught a remote flutter of wings; perhaps not.

  No. Only his own god would bring the sheath for a weapon and no food or drink. Only his own god would speak of cosmic issues and neglect to say whether his wife and child were alive or dead.

  You are incorrigible, Andrion told himself.

  The white line around his neck, the mark of the moon and star upon his tanned skin, suddenly tingled as if the necklace still lay upon it. The shield tugged gently at his arm. He heard the notes of the zamtak, a shower of shining gold through the oppressive air.

  They were alive. They were waiting. The ordeal continued; his duty lay clear before him. He would accept the vision, savor the enlightenment it brought, and struggle on.

  He hoisted the shield, settled the sword at his thigh, and looked around him. Several black fissures rent the peculiar luminescent walls. Andrion certainly did not want to return to the labyrinth of the temple, but he had no way of telling where each opening led.

  Danica, he remembered, had once followed a quest underground. He raised the shield and blew upon it, as she had. It flamed at his breath, emitting a clear light, tugging him toward one particular opening. “And thank you, Ashtar,” he said, with a polite bow aimed at nothing in particular. He entered the fissure and stone closed around him.

  Beneath the mountain of Tenebrio the earth was scored like an ancient face. And indeed Tenebrio was ancient, Andrion reflected as he trod warily through a pool of black, slick water like liquid obsidian. Mankind had abandoned such violent gods, leaving Tenebrio to gnaw his malevolence. These oppressive caves, now dim, now dark, but never light, were a catacomb not for human burial but for the burial of a dead belief.

  Almost dead. Eldrafel, a like green leaf on the hoary, partly decomposed trunk of an olive, was indubitably alive and seeking to reanimate the cadaver of his infernal ancestor.

  The passages looped back on themselves like a tangled thread; more than once Andrion came upon the prints of his own feet. At least he hoped they were his own feet. More than once he glanced behind him, certain that something followed him. But he saw only darkness gathered about him and the glow of the shield, dancing and jeering in the corners of his eyes. The rhythm of his breath was magnified by the enclosing rock until it became a wheezing bellows, echoing again and again in rushing waves of sound. The stone pressed down upon him, the great diabolical mass of Minras crushed him.

  He staggered, clutched the shield closer to him, and forced himself to breathe slowly of what little air there was. There, the sound abated. His sense of following evil did not.

  His mouth was as dry as a mummy’s; he dared a sip from a stream of water dribbling off a gargoyle-like projection. It eased his thirst, but its weedy flavor left his throat gummed and his teeth furred. Around another corner, sideways through a crevice, and he found stone lying in billows like a petrified wave. Upon the rock grew uneven ranks of mushrooms, their plump white caps glistening obscenely. He was hungry, but not that hungry. He moved on.

  In the silvery gleam of the shield he saw the ceiling of the passageway fold in upon itself and crack into knobby stalactites. The floor sprouted corresponding stalagmites. Andrion had to move adroitly to keep from sliding in the dripping slime, but the weight on his shoulders lifted a bit. A faint echo of falling water stirred the silence; this cavern was, indeed, very much like the cellars of the palace in Orocastria. And the stalactites reminded him of the pillars decorating the facades of the Orocastrian houses. Taurmenios Tenebrae, indeed, the elder god consuming the younger.

  Footprints smeared the floor, small female feet and a bull’s hooves intermingled. He stopped, quelled a shiver, went on. Sickly fungus plastered the scoriated walls. Even as he choked on their musty odor, he could swear the air was a little lighter.

  Andrion emerged into a vast underground chamber. The ceiling arched high overhead, lost in violet-blue depths like Chrysais’s eyes. The walls receded into a shimmering gloom. A faint muttering of voices came to his ear; he drew Solifrax before he realized that it was the sword and the shield themselves murmuring. Their glows sent shadows skittering away across the hummocked floor, surrounding Andrion with wraiths. He took a cautious step and something crunched moistly; startled, he saw bones and flowers falling to mold beneath his feet.

  The hair on the back of his neck prickled. Someone was indubitably watching him. He spun, sword upraised. The blade flared, an arc of fire in the dimness.

  A brief whisper of movement in the uncanny light; a woman, the hem of her dress a ripple of nothingness above the floor. Her flesh, revealed by the Minran bodice, was as gray and hazy as the Minran sky. Her jewels were facets of darkly gleaming flint. But her eyes—her wide, white-rimmed eyes—were quite lucid, as sharp as flensing knives.

  Andrion lowered the sword. His breath was a scintillating cloud of steam. Proserfina’s skirt wavered and fell lank again. “May I help you?” he asked.

  Her voice was an echo of an echo, elusively faint. Andrion had to strain to hear it, but hear it he did. “Eldrafel,” she sighed. “You must destroy Eldrafel.”

  “I intend to,” he replied, even as he thought, what horror, to seek the death of your own child. Andrion envisioned Proserfina confined in a stony cell, gazing out a window like a stubbornly slitted mouth, pleading and dreading while her belly swelled.

  She sensed his thought. “Yes, I prayed that my child would be as other children. But I was betrayed. By Taurmenios Tenebrae, whom I had faithfully served.” The air shivered with bitterness. The frail woman shape faded, so that Andrion could see stalagmites through it, and then solidified again. “It was a demon who came to me, who used me, not a god. I should have sought death that very night, but …”

  “We all must hope,” Andrion offered. How could he soothe a phantom?

  “My baby’s eyes were colorless,” whispered Proserfina, “like mirrors, the eyes of the demon. And I realized then that god and demon were one. Eldrafel—the demon’s spawn—laughed at my credulity, in a laugh that was not a child’s.” Her voice thinned and broke, swallowed by the silence.

  But her words went on, falling one by one into Andrion’s mind like the tones of the zamtak. “I stole away from my serving women and found Gath’s store of herbs. A posset of aconite, I thought, and I would know no more of what I had done. But I cannot forget; the memory sustains me.”

  “How may I help you to rest, lady?”

  “The priests greeted my baby’s arrival with rites such as those you escaped. To render him invulnerable they bathed his tiny form in the mingled blood of bull and man, and their own blood, as well, for they committed ghastly mutilations upon themselves in worship of the dark god.”

  Andrion cringed, his body shrinking at the image. And he thought, No wonder the demon priest had resisted the thrust of Solifrax.

  “But those who anointed him were drunk on herbs and pain and power. They did not realize that the places where they held him could not be touched by the blood.”

&
nbsp; “Ah,” said Andrion. “The marks of their hands upon him. Where?”

  “The nape of his neck, and the back of his right thigh. There he is vulnerable.”

  Andrion closed his eyes and opened them again. The feminine form hovered, waiting, still waiting. “My most humble thanks to you,” he said with a bow. “I shall do my best to dispatch Eldrafel.”

  “Yes …” The sibilant was a sudden breeze through the cavern. The phantom thinned again, became only an image sketched upon gauze, and then shredded completely away.

  The breeze stopped as suddenly as an intake of breath. The nape of his neck, Andrion repeated with a grim smile, and his right thigh… . The dim lavender light went out. A deep if distant bellowing boomed through the darkness. A phantom bull, thought Andrion. A skeleton, bones lime white and mad eyes glittering, roaming the tangled corridors, screaming its own agony.

  He told himself firmly the noise was only an air current rushing through the snarl of passageways, drumming in the rock. But he knew it was not. These caverns were so filled with sorcery that even he could sense the spectral otherworlds, good and evil both. This was what Dana suffered, he thought with a catch in his heart, trapped in some shady place where those worlds met and mingled.

  A susurration of voices, a threatening echo of the temple chant, stirred the darkness. Sword and shield gleamed, murmuring in return. “Ssh!” Andrion commanded, trying to ascertain the direction of the sound. Solifrax fell silent. The shield muttered truculently and quieted.

  No good; the sound surrounded him. A miasma of cold crept up from the ground and sucked at him. Dizzied, he swayed.

  Then the shield spurted light and almost jerked him off his feet. He shook himself and followed its lead. I must not panic, he told himself. I must walk carefully through the slime… . Slime. He raised the shield over his head. Its radiance swept the ceiling of the cavern, picking myriad tiny red pinpricks from an undulating carpet of blackness. Bats. An opening to the outside world must be nearby.

  The bat slime beneath his feet chittered and crawled. Something nibbled at his toe. He leaped and almost fell. The shield, impatient, pulled him on, a thread of light almost but not quite dispelling the horror.

  Footsteps squished behind him. One hoof, then two, in an uncanny manlike rhythm. It might really have been the thudding of his own heart, but he did not wait to find out. He stumbled on, his head so light that the aureole about shield and sword danced around him.

  A streak of brilliance curved down the darkness. He squinted; it was daylight. His nerves frayed and snapped at last. He ran for the cleft, thought for a ghastly moment he could not squeeze through, thrust both shield and sword ahead of him and burst out into sunshine. Thin, watery sunshine, but blessed even so. The free air, tainted though it was with the sweat of Minras, tasted like new wine.

  Something threw itself at the cleft behind him, scrabbling at it, trying to burrow through. Andrion did not stop to consider. Ignominiously he fled, leaping down the rocky crenellations of the mountainside until the cleft was only a dark line among the weathered boulders behind him.

  Then he stopped and leaned dizzily against a stone which despite the sunshine was cold. “Something objected to Proserfina’s message to me,” he gasped. “Terror is as good a weapon as any.” Well, yes, he had run away—but his business was out here, was it not?

  With a snort of derision modified by a wry crimp of his mouth, Andrion stood. He was still light-headed, it seemed; the ground heaved beneath him.

  And he smelled roasting meat. Really, these hallucinations were becoming annoying. Ignoring his stomach’s importunate rumble, he thrust Solifrax into its sheath and offered the shield an appreciative stroke of his fingertips. It sparked, sighed, and faded into quiescence.

  Andrion continued to smell meat. With a muttered oath he turned and began picking his way much more carefully down the scree, drawn by the tantalizing odor. He passed withered vines, half-collapsed stone walls, meadows overgrown by thistle and nettle. An occasional abandoned olive made its tortuous way through the black rock, and a mottled lizard or two lay hopefully in what passed for sunshine. No wind, no singing birds, no evil chants; Andrion’s own breath seemed as loud as a gale.

  At the side of a wizened tamarisk a solitary thread of smoke spiraled upward to join the hazy gray sky.

  He was on the far side of Mount Tenebrio, he realized. He crept closer to the tiny fire and the figure that bent over a spitted hare. From here he saw the blurred suggestions of field and farm, the interior of the island, flat as painted miniatures under the brooding hulk of the mountain and the lowering sky it anchored. The sea and Tenebrio’s two temples, sinks of malignancy, were behind him; Zind Taurmeni was an obscure blot ahead.

  His stomach flopped loosely under his ribs, and his foot dislodged a pebble. It bounced downward with all the noisy abandon of a ballista shot.

  The figure by the fire leaped up, seizing a spear. Most of his face was obscured by a fuzzy black beard, but the arch of the nose and the belligerent glare were quite familiar. Andrion stepped out from behind the boulder, flipped his cloak jauntily over one shoulder and said, “Greeting, Jemail. I am pleased to see you alive and free.”

  The man stood staring at face, sword, and shield, his beard bristling in indignant disbelief. “Have you returned from the dead?”

  “Almost.” Andrion sat rather abruptly onto a small rock. “Are you not going to offer me some of that hare?”

  Jemail shook his head, muttered under his breath, turned to the spit.

  Something clung to the hem of Andrion’s cloak. He picked it off, considered it a moment, and broke into a laugh. It was the long russet pinion from a falcon’s wing.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dana shifted again, but it was impossible to sit comfortably in a donkey cart. With a sigh she considered the desolate landscape crawling by on either side of the road.

  She could not imagine Minras ever being softly green, even in the summer; now, in the midst of winter, the stony bones of the island were as prominent as those in an old, sick face. Only the distant cone of Zind Taurmeni seemed young and brash, thrusting aside the pallid crust of Minras and yet clinging to it like an ill-mannered child. Now its black slopes were textured with snow. Perhaps it was that odd inside-out shadowing that made its outline seem different.

  Dana glanced upward, around the gaily, incongruously striped canopy. Billowing blue-black cloud stifled the sky, muting the daylight into a strange verdigris luminescence. The chill air stirred in gasps as impatient as her own thoughts. But her body was numb; the reek of sorcery and decay, although subtler here in the open air than in the temple, acted like a soporific drug. Perhaps the anticipated climax would never come, she thought wearily. Perhaps the ordeal would continue forever, into some eternal purgatory and beyond.

  She laid her hand on her shirt, taking a morsel of comfort from the tingle of Andrion’s necklace beneath. Sumitra had removed it from the zamtak two days before, when they had left the diseased caverns below Mount Tenebrio, saying, “In the confusion of the rites I doubt if anyone noticed Andrion give this to you. Here; keep it safe.”

  Dana had protested, writhing from her jealous temper tantrum, drained by the visions that had haunted her sleep.

  “It is yours,” Sumi had replied graciously. “He gave it to you in exchange for the shield, did he not?”

  Of course he had. Even Tembujin’s keen glance, Sumitra to Dana and back again, had acknowledged that. Dana had taken the necklace with embarrassing alacrity and muttered thanks.

  Damn Sumitra’s graceful poise, Dana thought now. Even huddled in the corner of this cursed cart, she sat placidly, her lashes casting a crescent on her smooth mahogany cheeks, her fingers playing as lightly with the strings of the zamtak as if she sat in her chambers in Iksandarun.

  Sensing Dana’s eye upon her, Sumitra looked up. A tightness at the corners of her mouth and a blurring of the depths of her eyes hinted that even now, nearing the midpoint of her pregnan
cy, the jolting of the cart might topple her back into nausea. But still she was calm.

  Sumi’s serenity had been forged in an ordered world, Dana thought, and turned always toward order. What strength to cling to such certitude even as it was inexorably rusted by the width of the sea and the degenerate dampness of Minras. But then, what courage to come halfway across the world to marry a stranger, making his people, his gods, and his complexities her own. Even if Sumi’s stranger had been not Andrion but Gath, as Chrysais’s was, the game would have been played quite differently. Or did Chrysais find her hand holding loaded dice? Dana dropped her eyes, shamed by understanding, knowing that she must understand. A matter of honor, she told herself firmly. My honor, and that of Sabazel. For Sabazel is not the only land that breeds honor in its daughters.

  Tembujin crouched sullenly at the other side of the cart, his bright black eyes seeming to count each blade in the thicket of spears surrounding them, his brows as low as the lowering storm clouds.

  “At least this time we do not have to walk across the island,” said Sumitra. She strummed the zamtak, but the notes were blunted by the stagnant air.

  “Damned island,” Tembujin snapped. “No place to go.”

  Dana and Sumi shared a frown. Tembujin, child of the open plains, found it excruciating humiliation to ride in a cart. Probably he would have leaped from the vehicle and taken his chances, except for the conviction that his presence somehow protected Sumitra. Even though his presence could do nothing to protect her, and that, too, galled him.

  Eldrafel came prancing by on a richly caparisoned gray gelding, as befit his androgyny. One hand was curled languidly on his thigh, the other directed the horse with the merest twitch of the reins. His eyes were silver polished with a tint of purple, reflecting nothing; his face wore a mirthless smile, unnervingly indecipherable. His languor was like a slap.