Shadow Dancers

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “You would still use sorcery, even now?” he shouted. “You have used too much, demon, and it wanes!”

  Eldrafel laughed. Blackness lanced again from his hands, upward, to spatter in a crackling crescendo against balconies and ceiling.

  Andrion had just enough wit to recoil, spinning with the others back into the hallway. The throne room rocked, the walls rattled, and with a roar the roof caved in. The Sardians crouched, hiding their heads from the crashing plaster and brick, suffocating in the roiling dust.

  Gard! Andrion plunged through, over, around the rubble back into the room, slipping and sliding uncontrollably; he fell in a miniature avalanche to the foot of the throne and was almost crushed by the precipitous arrival of his soldiers. Tembujin leaped catlike over them all and landed on his feet.

  The throne lay on its side, splintered into knife-sharp shards. Eldrafel, Rue, and Gard were gone. Tembujin probed through the rubble. Then, with a grimace of disgust, he turned to Andrion. “So, Eldrafel moves on to bigger and better realms.”

  Bigger and better realms indeed! Andrion set the hilt of Solifrax against his forehead. The sword warmed itself and tingled against his dirt-and sweat-caked skin. Every time I think we reach an end, he shouted silently, the end slides from our grasp! Too much to hope that Eldrafel would perish tidily at the hands of the gods—no, they have to leave a poor fool like me to tie up the loose threads.

  He lashed out in frustration, Solifrax chiming. Let him believe he has killed me. Let him believe that Tenebrio is still strong. In the end—and we will come to an end—his own pride must bring him low. Andrion’s flesh thrilled one more moment to the receding resonance of the necklace; then it was gone. Gard, another god’s pawn. Again he sliced the air.

  The legionaries shied, but Tembujin stood his ground. His face beneath its coating of dust was acute, deliberate, sardonic. “We shall find the boy when we find Eldrafel, back on the mainland.”

  “I know that!” Andrion snapped. Tembujin shrugged. The Khazyari, damn him, knew just when to goad and just when to shut up. Andrion set his teeth so tightly his jaw writhed. He led his men out the nearest door and was promptly lost in the tangled gloom of the labyrinth.

  They plodded through nightmare, through endless shadowed corridors, searching for the unattainable, Gard, or light, or the outer door. The sword in Andrion’s hand hummed very faintly with the resonance of the shield, now close, now fading; he could not follow it through this maze of rooms, and porticoes, and passages. Then, not surprisingly perhaps, he saw a hint of a shape before him; Proserfina, gesturing. They went the way she indicated, and came a few moments later onto a devastated terrace.

  Tembujin said under his breath, “What did you see?”

  “A ghost.”

  “Mmm. The gods are much too intimate with Minras to suit my taste.”

  “An unhealthy intimacy,” Andrion agreed. But then, he had encountered his own tutelary deity here; nothing, nothing was easy.

  Dana loped across a lower terrace, cradling a bundle in her arm. Her spear was tipped with fresh crimson. Of course, she would kill for a possession of Sumitra’s. Andrion laughed and groaned simultaneously, swallowed dust and coughed. Solifrax spat an inquisitive spray of sparks. Dana vanished into an alley, either unaware of or not taking the time to acknowledge Andrion’s scrutiny.

  The air had cleared somewhat; the sun was a white-hot disk stamped upon a sky like gray canvas. City and harbor were defined by a thin glaucous light, each ruined building, each ship a distinct silvered image. A trireme cleft the ash-matted water toward the harbor entrance, oars rising and falling rhythmically. The idols, stained a mottled green, shifted uneasily at its approach. Andrion squinted through watering eyes. Yes, there was the purple-clad, gold-crowned shape like a work of art adorning the foredeck. No, not even the wrath of the gods themselves could get rid of the man; he had more lives than a snow leopard of the Pathay! Andrion spat into the dust, but still his mouth tasted like a garbage midden.

  He glanced behind him, at the mountain. Had the rock rent itself open? It was hard to tell, for the entire slope was obscured by a flowing black mass. No, it was not black, but fissured with red, and seemed to be oozing downward in wave after torpid wave as if the mountain itself melted. Andrion frowned, not knowing what was happening, far from sure he wanted to know. Perhaps the god was purging his bowels, ridding himself of the disease that was Eldrafel. Wisps of blue smoke coiled like phantasms over mountain and city and crossed the face of the sun, cutting it into glowing segments.

  Andrion turned again to the harbor and stood transfixed. I am hallucinating, he told himself firmly. One of his soldiers emitted a cheer. Tembujin grounded his spear with a surprised, “By Khalingu’s teeth! Look at that!”

  Around the point of land where Niarkos’s ship had met destruction glided a Sardian galley. “Why, Harus,” Andrion breathed. “Thank you!”

  The trireme faltered, its oars leaving whorls in the turgid water. Then it steadied and plunged between the colossi so quickly the winged bulls seemed for a moment to totter on their pedestals. The wicked ram on the prow of the behemoth aimed directly at the galley. Andrion gestured wildly, rowing invisible oars, turning imaginary rudders.

  Specks of seamen furled the galley’s sail. Oars flailed. The galley turned. The trireme’s oars, blurred with motion, churned the water. The huge ship brushed by the smaller and left it wallowing in its wake.

  “Not big enough game for you, Eldrafel?” said Tembujin derisively.

  Andrion’s hand was clutching Solifrax as if he would squeeze the hilt in two. Quelling a brief giddiness, he said in what he hoped was a calm voice, “I must chide Miklos for leaving Rhodope sooner than I ordered.”

  “Certainly,” said Tembujin. “You do that.”

  The galley hovered with commendable caution outside the harbor entrance. Andrion hurried his men toward the nearest stair. The oozing red-laced blackness nudged into a vineyard. Each vine spurted with flame, fell, and was consumed by the heavy tide. Gods! Andrion exclaimed to himself, it is some kind of liquid fire! And its path was directly toward the harbor mouth, as if drawn by the colossi of the spited god. Of the spiteful god. Did Taurmenios know what he did, preferring suicide to Eldrafel’s contempt? Or had he been driven berserk, striking blindly, unaware?

  Zind Taurmeni belched, spraying the city with cinders and a particularly noxious breath. Andrion’s eyes burned and he choked. Several figures toiling across a far terrace dropped in their tracks. The Sardians sprinted from the poisonous environs of the palace downward into the city.

  They picked their way through streets clogged with rubble and with staggering people, some purposefully carrying bundles toward the docks, some huddling with stricken eyes, incapable of movement. Bodies, crushed by falling masonry, or apparently suffocated by dust and foul air, lay abandoned in the gutters. Fires muttered in several buildings.

  A shrieking mob thronged the jetties, fighting to get onto the docked ships. The one knot of efficiency was Niarkos and his men, bending a fresh, new sail onto the rigging of a tidy little merchant tub. A Rexian purple sail, Andrion saw, gleaming in variations from lavender to violet to maroon despite the rain of soot. He skidded to a halt by the gangplank. “What?”

  Niarkos gave a mighty heave on a line and the spar shivered and rose. “We worked our fingers to nubs on that sail,” he said from the corner of his mouth. “It was to go on His Elegance’s trireme, but he must have decided not to wait for it. It was lying here abandoned, my lord, and I thought it a shame to waste all our effort.”

  “Carry on,” Andrion said with a nod. So Eldrafel had been planning to make quite an entrance onto the stage of the Empire, ostentatious to the point of self-parody. That was not surprising.

  Dana emerged from the ship’s cabin, wiping dust from the shield. When she saw Andrion she leaped lightly across to the jetty. “These people will riot soon,” she said, “and start shoving one another into the sea. They have no one to lead them.” E
ven as she spoke, Andrion glimpsed one of the constables who had arrested Niarkos running madly along the dockside, eyes rolling, throwing aside an old woman.

  The viscous stony flood touched the far edge of the town. With a crackling sigh, several houses burst into flame and were moments later obliterated. Explosions echoed from farther away across the island, and banners of ash surged upward to swallow the sun. The ground rumbled and the air whimpered. The tumult along the docks approached panic.

  Andrion turned to Dana, Tembujin, and the legionaries, seized upon those passing faces that were the most coherent, and shouted orders. Slowly the human tide began to eddy around the clear lights of sword and shield, and the mob sorted itself into various ships.

  Several ships cast off, their gunwales lined with pale faces, and more than one cleared the gauntlet of the colossi. Andrion at last sheathed Solifrax and climbed a few rungs up the mast toward the furled purple sail. He peered through the grainy twilight toward the harbor mouth. The Sardian galley coasted close to Al Sitar, waiting for the lead ships of the flotilla to approach. A rowboat skimmed the crusty swells, its wake leaving a pleat all the way to Al Sitar itself,

  Thank the gods! Andrion’s face split into a grin as the boat came alongside the galley. He watched so intently as many hands lifted Sumitra aboard and Jemail scrambled up behind her, that he was shocked to feel the rough wood against his chest and realize he was still here at the jetty. She was safe, and the child within her.

  Andrion laid his cheek against the mast and let his mind spin free. He saw Sumitra convincing Jemail to row her out to the strange ship by threatening to row herself and leave him marooned. He saw a cloaked and helmeted Miklos bow before Sumitra and listen intently as she gesticulated. He saw Jemail tapping his spear upon the deck, no doubt eyeing with deepest suspicion the legionaries who eyed him.

  With a determined sigh Andrion roused himself. Dana, Niarkos, and Tembujin were oddly foreshortened figures upon the docks. The molten rock had devoured almost all the city; where had once been porticoes, avenues, and brightly-painted facades, were now smoking cinders. Only the great piers of rock around which the palace had lain like drifted confetti emerged above the destruction, charred sentinels half obscured by creeping tendrils of smoke. A stony tributary flowed relentlessly into the arena even as Andrion watched, and filled it for the last time with blackness and fire. Poetic justice, perhaps, but he could not help but think that in this battle of primeval powers, both sides lost. The gods must be as foolish as men. But if so, why were they gods?

  The leading edge of the torpid avalanche reached the sea, just at the jetty anchoring the nearest colossus. The rock hiccupped with blue, red, and yellow flames, brighter in the gathering gloom than any painted building. Dark, probing tongues touched the water. With a tremendous hiss a cloud of steam boiled up, laying a scintillant pall over the devastated face of the city. Andrion squinted; as the avalanche overwhelmed the jetty, the closest statue reared, hooves beating the air, horns tossing, wings flapping, and plunged into the melted rock. Lurid flame leaped up and swept it away.

  One ship rode the bow wave of the avalanche to safety; another veered so closely under its fiery brow that its sail smoked. Other ships hastily turned back. The second colossus danced on its pedestal and then chose immolation like its mate, Taurmenios sacrificing himself to himself.

  The liquid rock oozed across the harbor mouth and closed it with a great ridge of steaming slag.

  Andrion stared blankly for a moment, his lips shaping silent epithets. So you test me again, and again. He shook his head, trying to jog his exhausted mind. And it produced, oddly, an image of Gard sitting on a bench by the lotus pool. Andrion winced, but followed the thought; Gard used to hunt in the marshes at the shallow end of the harbor… .

  He slithered down the mast more quickly than he had intended, his muscles creaking with protest, his flesh impaled by splinters. “Niarkos!”

  The group on the dock, staring in rapt horror at the avalanche, started at his clarion call. The sea lion lumbered about. “My lord?”

  “How is the tide?”

  At least Niarkos did not look at him as Jemail often had, doubting his sanity. “Flooding, my lord. Almost at the full.”

  “Another small favor then,” Andrion responded. The glint in Dana’s eye told him that she was unspooling his thought faster than he would speak it, but everyone else was now staring raptly at him. “The marshes,” he called. “These merchant ships are round-bottomed, of shallow enough draft to be pulled across the marshes to the sea.”

  It was evidence, he thought, of the fear and desperation of the trapped people that they did not argue with him. Within moments the ships remaining at quayside had cast off and lurched through water that crunched against their bows toward the shallow, reedy area between the mainland and the far end of Al Sitar. The Sardian galley followed along the other side of the island; the ships that had already escaped set sail and disappeared into the murk.

  “By all the gods,” grumbled Niarkos to Andrion, “I had wanted to bring a trireme home to Sardis. But they were too big to pull across the shallows.”

  “We shall see one of them again,” Andrion replied bitterly. Damn Eldrafel, to make him so eager to kill.

  With a chunk the ship grounded against a mud bank. A few birds exploded with accusing squawks from the reeds, but most of them had fled to more congenial nesting grounds.

  Niarkos swore without discrimination at his own men and at the Minran sailors who had materialized at Andrion’s call. Within moments they attached ropes to the ships. Men and women alike ranged themselves like beasts of burden along the cables. They pulled, slipped and fell into the gray mud, rose and staggered on. Andrion and Dana and Tembujin pulled with the rest, groaning with effort and gasping from the foul odor released from the swamp as it was churned by many feet.

  Dana began some epithet about evil smells, but did not have enough breath to finish. Tembujin went white beneath his bronzed skin and screwed his eyes with effort. Andrion’s shoulders quivered. The reeds slapped him across the face; rotten vegetation buckled beneath his feet. Someone fell into a scummed pothole and had to be dragged out.

  Suddenly another shoulder pressed against his and he turned, dazed, to see Miklos, stripped to his chiton, pulling beside him, “Greeting, my lord,” the centurion said, as calmly as if he encountered Andrion in a Sardian avenue.

  Andrion mumbled some courtesy and threw his weight again against the ropes. Other Sardians burst through the muck and joined the Minrans. Andrion could barely see the mast of the galley slowly rising and falling like a beacon before him. The marsh itself heaved. Slime splashed up his legs. A cloud of gnats spun with unerring aim into his eyes, nose, and mouth. Perhaps, he thought, the streaming sweat would wash them away.

  Several small explosions echoed from Zind Taurmeni. Every ship lunged forward at once, jerked with terrified strength. The round bottoms left huge gouges behind them, scars quickly scabbed by bubbling mud and gas.

  Reeds, and gnats, and the deadening weight; Andrion was delirious with pain. It took several moments for him to note that he was not squelching in the slick mud of the marsh but was splashing in water. He peered between his lashes. His eyes uncrossed and focused upon the galley; it seemed to drift in midair as gray waves rocked it against the gray sky. Sumitra hung onto the railing, straining toward him so intently that for a moment he felt her strength soothing the burning in his arms and back, her breath blowing the fresh scent of jasmine into his laboring lungs.

  He sputtered, seized sanity, and shouted, rather strangled but with spirit nonetheless, “We have reached the sea! One more effort!” And with one more effort the small ships were manhandled onto the beach, where the rising tide floated them.

  Andrion crawled over the gunwale of the galley at Sumitra’s side and clasped her, the spindle around which the world reeled. An apparition appeared before him; a human body plastered with mud and dirt, sweat and soot, topped by two obsidian eyes. Oh
, it was Tembujin. I must be that filthy too. Each of his teeth wore its own coat of algae, but Sumi’s kiss did not falter.

  Dana leaned against the rail. She was unrecognizable except for her glassy green eyes and the disk of the shield on her back, which managed a dull but brave gleam despite its splatters of muck. Jemail hovered to the side, covered with more than a little mud himself. Niarkos bellowed from the rigging of the merchanter, organizing the flotilla. The purple sail unfurled in a splendid cascade of color, flapped and bellied. Yes, there was a wind, tentative, stained with sulfur and rot and the ghastly stench of the burning city, but a wind nonetheless.

  Andrion ached as if he had been beaten. His tongue was as cracked and dry as a burned branch. His mind spun crazily about an abyss of exhaustion. He forced himself to stand upright; no, I cannot collapse into blissful oblivion, not yet. He laid an arm across Sumitra’s shoulders, more to support himself than to reassure her. Something, he thought, had for hours now been poking his side like a thorn. He fumbled behind his belt and produced Chrysais’s sardonyx amulet, carved not in Eldrafel’s image but in that of Tenebrio. Blearily he stared at it.

  Dana stared, too, catching what breath she had. “It changed,” she said. “Perhaps it carries some last mote of Tenebrio’s wasted power.”

  The amulet leered. With a curse Andrion thrust it back.

  The flotilla passed Al Sitar. The harbor mouth was gone, Orocastria was gone. A grimy cloud swirled upward, closing the sky with a silent curtain of grit; florid light danced along its underside like the illusory flames Eldrafel had summoned from the pit on Tenebrio. Chrysais’s funeral rites, Andrion thought. She has taken her realm and many of her subjects with her into the grave.