Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Eldrafel, the evil genius of this place, stood upon a nearby promontory of rock. His hands were outstretched, his face was carved of rose porphyry, his jewels shone like drops of blood. He intoned a fell chant in a voice not hoarse, not harsh, but blasphemously pure and clear. Lord of darkness, lord of death, leader of souls; the god from the sea, shadow made flesh …

  Sumi scrabbled for coherence. This cannot be happening to me, or to my child; I am asleep in my chambers in Iksandarun and will wake to Andrion’s indulgent chuckle that I could imagine such a dream! She wrenched suddenly, breaking the grip on her arms. She spun. One step, two, and she tripped and fell.

  Another pair of hands plucked her up. Strong, firm hands, long fingers, not shackles on her arms but protective vambraces. She looked up. A hooded face peered down at her, all angles and pale resolve, sooty hair and beard, dark eyes. Gods, the eyes were a pellucid brown, layer upon layer of lambency, unsullied by fire or gloom.

  Andrion! she wanted to scream, always you return for me! But with an effort she did not. She sagged, faint with joy, but the hands held her up and pressed her into another, surly but resigned, grasp.

  Eldrafel’s voice stopped. In the silence the burble and hiss of fire reverberated in the abyss. A tendril of blinding blue flame snapped above the rim and fell back, leaving a spectral trail of lightning to play along the jagged rock. A crimson glow rose upward, illuminating the banks of cinders that drifted across the sky like black algae across a pond.

  Eldrafel turned. His flesh and hair gleamed scarlet, but his eyes remained frost gray. His steady gaze fixed upon Sumitra, raked her, abandoned her and splintered into fangs of ice. His lip curled in a venomous snarl, uncannily aware of the interloper close at hand.

  Sword and shield raised as one, Sumi thought, the light of sun and moon driving away darkness. As if drawn from her own vision, shield and sword glinted before her. A many-pointed star spilled rivulets of quicksilver, a crystalline crescent shone as bright as the sun. She winced as she would wince at the apparition of a god, awed and yet yearning toward it. The radiance cleared her mind like a gust of clean wind.

  A guard rushed forward, and another, their spear points dull flames. The shield leaped up, chiming, and Solifrax sang. The flames were extinguished. The guards fell. The priests, rendered into one indistinct mass by the attacking light, quailed.

  Cursing his soldiers, Eldrafel lunged alone toward Andrion. Blackness streaked from his fingertips and broke against the shield to mingle with the cinders swirling across the mountainside.

  It was Jemail, Sumitra realized, who held her. He was drawing her away, as if he were a genuine priest loyally guarding the sacrifice.

  The guards, goaded by Eldrafel’s scorn, rushed again toward the weapons he desired, the man he named his victim. But it was more than a man, it was Andrion, Beloved of the Gods, who danced now, his gestures not elegant but precise, economical, deadly. The shining disk of the shield unspooled clean skeins of light; the glittering arc of Solifrax sewed them to darkness, mending it. The guards scattered, howling in fear.

  Of course, Sumitra said to herself, Eldrafel had indeed intended to sacrifice me. But he had also intended to draw Andrion here, to kill him and take the weapons; amusing, that his only too mortal followers were stunned by a god-crazed audacity equal to his own.

  The shield chimed, a deep note ringing against the lowering sky. The sword leaped and parried. Scattering a knot of soldiers, Andrion rushed Eldrafel’s promontory. Solifrax shrieked, and jewels spewed from the priest’s body, but his flesh remained unscathed.

  Andrion did not pause; he raised the shield and thrust forward, pushing Eldrafel toward the abyss. But with a howl of frustration and rage and a backward spray of dark flame, the priest leaped, twirled in midair over the fiery chasm like over the shoulders of a bull, and landed gracefully on the far side, safe in the arms of darkness. His voice echoed, shouting curses which pelted down like stinging embers, and then was gone.

  Sumitra would have shouted herself, her patience worn thin—he escaped yet again, his evils continued, the ordeal would never end… . Her tongue seemed too large for her mouth.

  The ground rumbled and shivered. A blinding incandescence surged up the abyss, spilling liquid fire over the rim. Andrion jumped away, but two priests were not as swift. Flames licked out and ignited their cloaks, leaving them writhing and screaming among the rocks. Not one of their colleagues stayed to help them; the other priests and the guards rushed in a struggling mass down the mountain.

  Andrion seized Sumitra. The honest radiance of sword and shield emphasized the starkness of his face, honed by days of short rations and worry. But his luminous eyes were unchanged, and the tight, lopsided grin he offered her was achingly familiar. She buried her face in the warmth of his chest, and he held her close in a moment of mute communion.

  “Come,” Jemail said, with a frantic shooing gesture.

  Sumitra roused herself. “Come where?”

  Andrion settled her in the angle of his left arm, in the light of the shield. The blade of Solifrax, held before them both, was unstained by the blood it had shed. Andrion regarded it with detached irritation. He had not killed for seven years now, Sumi knew, and all that sparring in the palace courtyards had been merely—no, not merely exercise. Incorrigible Andrion had never quite trusted fate to let him lie fallow.

  The brilliance poured ahead of them. Sumitra felt as if her steps were buoyed up, by Andrion and light together, and she floated down the path up which she had stumbled only a short time before. “Come where?” she asked again. “To rescue Dana and Tembujin?”

  “To the dye works,” answered Andrion tightly, caught between duties. “We must reach Niarkos before Eldrafel has time to enspell him again. Then Dana and Tembujin.”

  Ah yes, Niarkos had been enspelled with the tapestry. Sumi had never seen it. “And Chrysais?”

  “She is dead,” Andrion said, flat.

  “Ah. Perhaps not unrepentant, not quite unredeemed?”

  Andrion clasped Sumitra close, fiercely possessive; unashamedly she clung to him. “We must part again,” he murmured, “but not for long, love.”

  She would have protested, but she would rather be as strong as he, and play the celestial, the diabolical game to the end just as bravely. The glare from the wound in the mountain dwindled, but never quite died. Its truculent glow followed them as they crept down the far flank of the mountain. They avoided the torches of Orocastria, a swarm of tiny red insect eyes, and made their way toward the coast. Where the polished ebony of the sea heaved and stretched like a sleeper in the grip of ghastly dreams.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The clangor of the abused zamtak lingered in Dana’s ears all night, overriding the rise and fall of a piping just enough off-key that it scraped her nerves. As if her nerves were not already raw, the terrible vision of Chrysais’s death had grated them into bloody shreds. Chrysais had been born with Bellasteros’s contradictions, with Andrion’s; yet she had been born a woman, with her own cloying courage. Dana could not find the will to deal with Chrysais, not now.

  She heard the singing of sword and shield, and knew that her desperate message to Andrion had been received. Why? she asked herself; why had she so drained her strength to warn him of Sumitra’s peril when he might have discovered it for himself?

  The darkness around her eased a bit. Dawn, or a lessening of the cinder fall, or both? The tiny lamp had given up the ghost long since, but then, it could not have protected her from the odd tactile chill that sucked the warmth from her limbs and the steadiness from her mind. She had courted the cold, she knew, sitting with her back against the wall; she needed Tembujin’s presence on the other side of the stone more than she needed physical warmth. She doggedly ignored memories of what his presence could at times mean.

  “And now?” he called. His voice was a fiery liqueur.

  “They found soldiers at the dye works.” Of course, Eldrafel would have the Sardians guarded. He had proba
bly had them guarded even when they were insensible. Being untrustworthy himself, he would trust no one else.

  The vision poured into her, filled her, seared her like molten bronze.

  Sumitra sat on a low stone wall, her knees drawn up, armed with a stick to push away the sinuous forms that stirred the shadows around her. Her eyes were lamps turning again and again to the buildings nearby.

  Andrion pressed himself against a corner and peered around it. Torchlight, ruddier than the luminescence of the sword and shield he held, washed over his features and eroded them from the smooth visage of a god into the taut and weary face of a man. He frowned with calculation.

  Human figures rushed among the pits and piles of the factory, into the low sheds and back again, fighting the centipedes and snakes. One small group hurried off toward the city, burdened with several large bundles that must be bolts of cloth; the rose shimmer of the fabric was an odd pastel note in a scene otherwise drawn in black and red.

  The stink of the rotting shellfish was overwhelming. Andrion strangled a cough. Dana clung to her Sight, wheezing.

  Seven Sardians were seated under an overhanging roof; the eighth, Niarkos, was a great black hulk exchanging insults with a Minran officer. Perfectly lucid insults, thank the gods, if as uninventive as most procreative and eliminatory expletives were likely to be. With a mirthless grin Andrion stepped into the torchlight.

  Solifrax rang, and the shield chimed agreement. The Sardians leaped up with cries of joy. The Minrans stopped dead and spun about. The centipedes, unimpressed, continued to scurry among their feet.

  Andrion shouted and charged as if he had a legion at his back. Niarkos felled the officer with one blow of his massive hand. The Sardians erupted, seizing spears and staves before the Minrans could recover from their surprise. They went about their task of subduing the guards with relish, settling a few grudges.

  Dana leaped to her feet, staggered against the table, and began to pace back and forth, flexing her arms to draw the blood like acid back into them.

  One guard stepped upon an adder, which turned and bit him. He yowled and danced, and a Sardian tripped him into a pool of slimy, rotting shellfish. His flailing emitted a miasma as palpable as the still-drifting ash.

  The Minrans fell back toward a huge shoal of empty shells. Jemail lunged out with a cry. Expressionlessly, he cut and thrust with his spear, sending more than one of his erstwhile colleagues into the pile of shells. They were broken, and their sharp edges lacerated like knives.

  Solifrax flickered, reflecting red, and gold, and purple. The shield pulsed with its own clear moonsheen. Niarkos crossed spears with Jemail, who whooped indignantly and was saved by Andrion’s shout. With a shrug Niarkos turned, saw the officer he had felled struggling to rise, and whacked him with the butt of his spear into a vat. He splashed and wallowed. Purple dye fountained in rose and lavender droplets, anointing Sardian as well as Minran.

  Andrion’s clear voice rose above the tumult, directing the battle. The reek of the charnel house hung in a shivering cloud above building and vat. Purple slime splashed and eddied in rivulets, in currents, in waves washing the combatants down the beach into the sea… .

  Dana’s vision elongated like a candle flame in a breeze and went out. She groped after it, senses quivering open, but could feel only the remote clash of sword and shield.

  Suddenly her unguarded awareness trembled to a crawling dread. Gooseflesh tightened her skin. The darkness simmered with more than just the poison of creeping dumb creatures; a relentless malice gathered itself over Minras—something beyond the power even of Eldrafel, or perhaps it had been roused by Eldrafel’s power, who had set the elementals, Tenebrio and Taurmenios, to feuding—her thought frayed maddeningly into nothingness.

  “And now?” called Tembujin.

  “I do not know, I do not know!” The tremulous piping grew louder, joined by a flute, gaining definition as the world outside the window coagulated into day. The hour before dawn, when condemned criminals were executed. Marching steps rang in the corridor.

  Dana glanced regretfully at the zamtak and its tapestry covering. The door burst open. A guard dragged her outside and threw her against Tembujin. They stared at each other a moment, black lacquered eyes and eyes cut like emeralds making a pact. The air was narcotic, in the last throes of a wasting disease. The stench of irex was overwhelmed by a stench of sorcery so strong it must have emanated from the ground itself.

  The soldiers hurried their prisoners through the palace as if racing toward a finish line. Dana glimpsed the lotus pool and cringed; its lid of cinders was a scab hiding a mortal wound. Charcoal in drifts and shoals lay everywhere, crunching underfoot in bursts of shining dust. The stars were smeared like weeping eyes across a shrouded sky.

  A pale figure moved on a far terrace. Dana suppressed a start. Phantom Proserfina, probably, her hands raised in urgent gesticulation. Or perhaps phantom Chrysais. But surely she was settled, once and for all.

  The soldiers kicked aside the mangled bodies of snakes and centipedes. They must have lived a nightmare last night, fighting these vile creatures, unable to fight the black and malodorous air and the uneasy twitching of a land caught in an evil spell.

  The stars faded. The sky was swept by an eerie opalescence. The gaudy palace decorations, abraded by the rain of cinders, were in the dawn only gray shapes. The room into which Dana and Tembujin were thrust was like a tomb, dank and dark, stirred by the tiny glints of bat eyes… . No, what watched them were not bats but several robed priests.

  Fresh kilts, wide belts, faience necklaces and bracelets lay ready—like the ones worn by the young bull dancers in Tenebrio’s moonlit temple, Dana realized. Of course. She was past surprise, past fear.

  Tembujin and Dana changed into the ritual garb under the unblinking eyes of the priests, eyes that were devoid of any human emotion, humor, or hate, or even lust for the bodies displayed before them. What sleight of hand did the Khazyari use, Dana wondered with a quick sideways glance, to switch the small knife from shirt to kilt without revealing it? Probably sheer desperation.

  The priests glided out. The soldiers gestured. The arena opened before them. The air gathered in it was almost too unwholesome to sustain life; as the guards shoved them onto the floor, Tembujin gasped and Dana’s heart hammered. Her head seemed stuffed with yarn, her thought crawling agonizingly after the traipsing strands of Sight. Her clanking jewelry hung as heavy and cold as chains. The skin of her naked chest puckered with horror.

  The great slab of the altar was decorated with … black flowers? No, dark red amaranth, like ancient bloodstains. Torches guttered and died along the railings. Row upon row of phosphorescent eyes, wide with anxious anticipation, gazed down upon them. Other dancers stood like wax dolls, faces set in an oddly emotionless, no doubt drug-induced, elation. Dana’s tall and rounded form, Tembujin’s strong shoulders and thighs, contrasted sharply with the others’ slender sexless bodies.

  In a box at the side sat Gard, overseen by several burly soldiers. Did he know about his mother’s death? Probably. Probably he suspected its cause. His delicate features were stern beyond his years, those of an orphan who has had to learn harsh lessons in self-sufficiency. Dana grimaced with pity and dull anger when she saw that Gard bore upon his narrow chest, half concealed by a purple cloak, Andrion’s necklace. The boy’s shoulders were rounded, his neck oddly lengthened, his body crushed under the weight of the moon and star. In the feeble light the necklace was tarnished brass, its power stubbornly muted.

  Rue sat beside Gard, as sumptuously coiffed and painted as Chrysais had once been, her eyes so bright as to be slick. Her open dress emphasized the scrawniness of her body; her breasts might have plumped somewhat under Eldrafel’s ministrations, but still resembled stunted apricots. She gazed out over the arena, her face set in rancid arrogance apparently meant to imitate, but which only mocked, Chrysais’s bravura pride.

  Priests herded in several garlanded bulls. The animals jerked and s
hifted nervously, emitting plaintive bellows. Tembujin laid his hand upon his belt; there, Dana told herself, that was where he had concealed the dagger. We shall at least sell our lives dearly; no, we shall not die, burnt offerings upon a demon’s altar—this is not the altar of the demon, but of the dishonored god… . Her perception grasped not clear image but mazy impression.

  Eldrafel sauntered across the arena and posed beside the altar, naked except for his dancing costume, glowing despite the chill. “Khalingu,” Tembujin spat, “if I have to watch him making love to himself again I shall surely vomit.”

  Dana agreed. “I should think the gods themselves would vomit.”

  As if a dyke were breached in the east, beyond Mount Tenebrio, waves of crimson light washed across the low ceiling of the sky. Row upon row of watching faces blushed. But the dawn could not lighten the forbidding bulk of Zind Taurmeni, or restore the bright colors to the palace facade; no wind eased the chill contagion of the air. The music grew even keener, a high-pitched, fast-paced wail which trembled in the stones of the arena. Yes, Dana wailed silently, yes, this was my vision in Cylandra’s basin, only my vision was different—not fair, O gods, not fair! Her head spun, the mountain looming higher and higher, the palace slumping into slag, the sky stained with blood.

  A gateway opened. Two soldiers dragged in a tall, lean figure, head drooping, face dirty… . Dana’s heart jolted free and fell with a resounding crash into her belly; surprise and fear, as fresh as if she’d never felt them before. Andrion. They had Andrion.

  Eldrafel’s brows arched in amazed pleasure. Then, with his usual sublime self-absorption, he smirked and pirouetted and escorted the two soldiers and their prisoner toward the altar. One man held the shield, one the sword; their faces wore no expression beneath their close-fitting leather caps. The ubiquitous hooded priests shuffled into place behind them, their hoods thrown back to reveal their dark and eager faces.

  The dancers jostled each other. Dana slumped. But wait—she shook herself free of the muck that clogged her mind and looked again at the booty the soldiers held. The shield pulsed with subtle but unmistakable motes of light. The sword hummed patiently, just at the edge of hearing. And yet Andrion seemed hardly conscious. He stumbled over the cinders and his eyes—his eyes were downcast, their expression hidden.