“My lord?”
“Yes, yes, sing for me.” He threw himself down among the tangled bedclothes, trying vainly to find a comfortable position. A song, to turn his mind from the doubts, the dreams, the curse of his stepfather Gerlac.
Her voice was a clear soprano, delicate and yet forceful enough to stir the air. Bellasteros watched bemusedly as the shadows shifted in brief subtle movements just at the edge of his vision. The coals in the brazier sprang into flame, sparking into an iridescent mist that blurred the outlines of Theara’s body and suggested those of the gods and demons of her song.
It was the ancient lay of Daimion, the hero who with his sword Solifrax had carved out the Empire. The god-king who had ruled most of the known world, ages ago when Sardis was only a village of mud huts. But even then Solifrax had been an ancient weapon, forged in the time of the gods’ awakening. When Daimion in his pride refused to relinquish the enchanted sword, he was struck with madness and his descendents cursed.
And Daimion in his pride also had repudiated his companion, the Sabazian priestess-queen Mari. Even her name had long been expurgated from the Sardian version of the story. But Bellasteros had heard it—not only from Danica, he realized now, but earlier, in the songs sung to an infant prince by his nurse, the last of Viridis’s imperial retinue.
Theara sang, and images formed themselves from song and shadow like those called from burning lethenderumlethenderum, Bellasteros told himself in a weary resignation. That’s what that scent was, coriander, saffron, and sandalwood. He did not wonder where Theara had obtained the Sabazian drug. He had, after all, been encompassed since birth by the borders of Sabazel.
He glanced at Theara and she smiled at him above the arch of the lyre. Her eyes counseled rest and sleep, and her voice led him from his body into the midst of the wavering images.
He stood beneath a great tree. Its trunk was gnarled with age, but still it sent forth fresh shoots, and the branches were heavy laden with golden fruit. The blue vault of the sky winked and sparkled behind cascading green leaves.
Thick grass welled up between the writhen roots of the tree, and there, driven deep into the turf, was a sword. It trembled, as if it had just that moment been set there, an unseen hand plucking it from the sunlight and carving for it a sheath from the earth itself. The blade was of a steel so highly polished it seemed crystalline, curving in a gentle arc, not like the straight stabbing swords of Sardis, but resembling rather an imperial scimitar—or the slender saber that Danica carried.
It seemed she was there, watching him. Her shield hummed with a pale light, not that of the sun but of the moon. Her green eyes were shuttered and cool, her lips tight in a secret, inward smile. He wanted to shake her from her complacency. He wanted to see her as troubled as he.
But the sword glistened, and she nodded toward it, and his hand moved to set itself on the golden filigree of the hilt. It was warm to his touch. It might have been made for him, so well did it fit his hand. Light flared around his fingers, so that his flesh seemed to burn, but he would not release it. He pulled, slowly and steadily, and the turf yielded the blade to his grasp.
Bellasteros raised the sword to the sky. The sunlight flashed along its length, leaped across the grass, gleamed in rippling refractions from Danica’s shield. She threw back her head, smiling, raising the star-shield in reply.
Beyond the branches of the tree a falcon floated, its sharp eye glittering in the light of day.
*
The oracle was partly concealed by the pungent smoke that welled from a hissing firepot set before her. She swayed back and forth, muttering, her wizened hands outstretched, shredding the smoke between her fingers. She wore a loose robe and hood of an indeterminate color, perhaps gray, perhaps blue— the color of dawn on a hazy, rainy day. Within the hood only her eyes could be seen, glinting oddly pale, reflecting not the crimson fire but some internal light of their own.
Adrastes tightened his clasp of Chryse’s arm. But she made no move to flee; she stood upright, her back stiff, her chin high. Her body quivered like a plucked lyre string.
The smoke coiled upward, snaking around the rough-carved columns, dimming them to shadows. Some small creature cheeped, high in the rafters, and was quickly stilled. Through a fissure in the ceiling a sliver of starstudded sky wavered and disappeared, scummed with smoke as the walls of the oracle’s chamber had been scummed by centuries of soot.
The oracle bent forward and inhaled deeply of the smoke, her lungs laboring in deep, rasping wheezes. Chryse blinked, the whites of her eyes glinting above her veil. Adrastes stood as still as a statue, his sharply angled nose and bearded chin as fresh and cold as from a sculptor’s tool.
The oracle spoke. Her voice was high-pitched, uninflected, vibrating in the smoke rather than in the old woman’s body. “The hand that draws the sword of Daimion will carve with it an empire, even as did Daimion’s hand in the dawn of time. A new god-king, a new empire.”
The voice trailed away into a sigh. The smoke thinned, eddying upward in trailing wraiths among the pillars. “Where?” Adrastes demanded, so harshly that Chryse started away from him. “Where is the sword?”
The oracle inhaled again, shuddering. For a moment it seemed as if the woman’s frail form would slip from the stool where it perched. But she reached out, and the smoke buoyed her up. “In the tree at the world’s edge. Guarded by …”
Adrastes leaned forward, his black eyes brilliant adamant in the shade of his brows. “Guarded by the eye of Harus,” he stated.
“Guarded by Sabazel.” The oracle slumped from her stool, a crumpled bundle on the stained flagstones, and the smoke whirled away and was gone.
“Sabazel,” hissed Adrastes. His hand crushed Chryse’s arm and she squeaked in pain. In a moment he regained his cool demeanor, released her, bowed graciously. “My apologies, lady. I was taken aback, to hear that name spoken here beneath Harus’s wing.”
Chryse tried to speak, failed, swallowed. “My lord will draw the sword,” she whispered. “Surely it is he who will take for Sardis Daimion’s ancient Empire. And if the witch-queen can aid him …”
“Can she?” Adrastes murmured. “Is that why my spell went awry; Harus saves her for another fate? But the hooded falcon on Ashtar’s wrist— I like not this talk of Sabazel. I like not that he should see her again.”
Chryse looked up at him, as bewildered by his words as if he spoke in a foreign tongue. “What can I do, Your Eminence, to help him in his quest, and to help free him from… that woman?”
Adrastes smiled, thinly, slyly. He took Chryse’s elbow and guided her away from the ashes of the firepot and the blue cloak covering the still form of the oracle. “I fear, lady, that I must summon you from your devotions. Prepare yourself for a journey.”
Chryse opened her mouth as if to protest, thought better of it, bowed her head dutifully. Her clasped hands trembled on her breast.
The door closed behind the inquisitor and the reluctant wife. The dark shapes of priestesses moved to gather up the fallen oracle. As their hands touched the cloak it shredded into mist and dissipated with a faint shimmer upward, a star shadow reabsorbed into the sky. Where it had lain only a faint soft-silvered shape marked the stones. The priestesses glanced hurriedly around, but no one else was there. They fell to their knees before the signature of the goddess.
A gust of wind chimed through the columns, and then all was silent.
*
It was late afternoon when Danica turned away from the shimmering basin of water, left the hollow in the mountainside, and started up Cylandra’s flank. The valley that sheltered Sabazel narrowed here to the merest cleft, a rocky defile impassable to those who did not bear the ancient knowledge of foothold and handhold and balancing point.
Danica’s only companion was Lyris, the Sardian servant freed from the evil spell that had bound her. Shandir’s attentions had healed the young woman physically and Atalia had taught her the use of weapons as she had once taught Danica her
self. But Lyris’s spirit was still weak, her faith in Harus torn from her, her faith in herself sorely wounded. She followed Danica up the mountain as she followed her every day in the streets of Sabazel, tight-lipped, silent, guarding the woman she had tried to kill with the same dogged desperation with which she guarded her own sanity.
Danica glanced back as the young woman leaped gamely over a deep fissure. She made an encouraging sound and turned to the next stretch of the path that circled Cylandra. Lyris more than deserved this initiation into the ranks of her Companions—she needed it to survive. Faith in Ashtar would sustain her.
And my own faith, Danica thought, suffering a trial by ordeal … It was time to renew her own initiatory vows, she told herself. It was time to see the cavern once again. Although this time she had not fasted beforehand, and she had not required it of Lyris. The Sardian woman was still emaciated from her solitary journey, and Danica would not starve her babe—by the gods, she told herself, the agitation of our minds should bring visions enough.
Slow but surefooted they left behind the olive and asphodel of the lower slopes, emerging at last on a tumbled scree at the base of a cliff. Rivulets of ice glinted down the face of the rock, strands of crystal reflecting the pale pinks and ambers of the setting sun. Above the grey stone a rim of snow stood stark and white against the darkening sky.
Danica wrapped her cloak more tightly around her body and inhaled deeply of the cold, clear air. Lyris stood just to the side and behind her, in her usual position, her chin thrown back and her hands raised as if in supplication. Before them the high plains stretched to a shadowed horizon smudged with a hint of mountains; clouds like smoke barred the livid face of the sun. The slender horns of the ripening moon drifted high above, borne upward by the high, clear song of the wind.
“There,” Danica said quietly. “There is the edge of the world. Sardis lies behind you.”
Lyris said nothing. Her hands dropped to her sides.
In her mind’s eye Danica saw scarlet Sardian pennons ranged as watchfires around Sabazel, shedding a thick smoke into the sky, closing Ashtar’s alert eye. She saw the gold pavilion glinting blood-red, blood-warm in the light of the fires. She saw the flame in the conqueror’s dark eyes, a deep unquenchable flicker of ambition and of arrogance. She wanted to shake him from his complacency. She wanted to see him as troubled as she.
The sun disappeared into darkness, engulfed by streaming night. Danica turned, picking her way across the scree, and Lyris followed. They ducked into an opening in the cliff.
Danica found an oil lamp set ready on a shelf, lit it with the waiting flint and tinder, and held it before her as she led Lyris down the tunnel. The tiny light showed the marks of ancient axes on the arching ceiling and the smooth floor. The women emerged onto a promontory like one end of a broken bridge, overlooking a gentle blue darkness filled with the murmur of running water, water singing half-remembered legends. A distant tongue of flame stood up bright and clear in the shadows.
Here the marks of the axes stopped. This was a great natural cavern, carved by a rushing underground river in some early age of the world. The dome of the roof was supported by pillars of living rock.
Danica smiled. It was a comfort to come here, to the very heart of Cylandra, within the warm womb of the earth itself. Ashtar’s womb, she thought. Once she had come here as an acolyte, a young and untried sprig of her present self. Long ago, it seemed, like a faintly remembered legend garbled by the telling and the retelling. She had dreamed of battle, of enemies hemming Sabazel; she had dreamed of a man’s dark, even features. She had awakened bathed in sweat, her heart pounding, knowing that her dream was not the nightmare of an acolyte unsuited to be a warrior, knowing that her dream was true. And that was more frightening than any nightmare.
She had emerged from the cavern her mother’s squire. She had borne her arms in the presence of the emperor Kallidar, on that fatal embassy a decade before; Kallidar, blaming the Sabazians for the death of his cousin Viridis, had closed the ancient temple of Ashtar and treacherously attacked them. Danica had received the star-shield from her mother’s dying grasp, beneath the walls of imperial Iksandarun. And now she was herself Sabazel.
“I ask for your counsel, Mother,” she murmured. “Your counsel, and peace for this my friend.”
And peace for yourself, daughter?
“Peace for Sabazel. For myself—if I have earned it.” Danica stepped carefully down the rockcut staircase at the side of the promontory, finding the path that stretched across the floor of the cavern toward the solitary flame. Pale, blind snakes whisked silently away from her feet and she clucked to them as she would to a pet parrot or hyrax.
The fire had burned in its carved basin for uncounted generations, fueled by some seepage in the rock. Behind it was a wide doorway in the wall of the cavern; Danica led Lyris through into a small round grotto that echoed to the trill of a waterfall. She bent over the ancient water channel, bathed her face and hands, and drank. The stream was ice-cold, like a sparkling wine on her tongue. At her signal Lyris drank also and ducked her head into the water as if she sought to drown herself.
“Yes,” Danica told her. “The water will cleanse you of the past. Take heart.”
Lyris emerged shaking her head, drops flying upward like jewels in the firelight. “I—I would believe that, lady.”
“Believe it.” Danica set the lamp in a niche and stretched herself on a rush-strewn bench. Lyris crouched at her feet, arms wrapped around her bent legs, her face hidden.
The nausea and lassitude of Danica’s early pregnancy had indeed spent itself by the third month; for the last two turns of the moon she had felt almost her old self. Five months, she thought, since we … loved. She would never be her old self again. As for what she would be—the uncertainty of the future gnawed at her. She would be leaving Sabazel soon, after the next full moon, when she should be waiting quietly for the birth of the child. She would be leaving her sanctuary on a quest. This night I shall show to you your path. And I shall lend you my power, to smooth your way.
“And his way. Mother.”
Yes. This game is his as well.
Danica glanced at Lyris. Something in the young woman’s attitude reminded her of Ilanit. They were the same age, after all, a taut sixteen. Her daughter had made no more mention of Patros but had participated in the autumn rites, gracefully accepting the embraces of a young minstrel. Had the young man wondered, Danica asked herself wryly, why Ilanit asked again and again for the songs of Sardis and the lay of Daimion?
Daimion, yes. There was the key to this new gambit. Theara’s latest message reported that she had indeed been singing the legends to Bellasteros, and that his conversation was beginning to turn on the whereabouts of the sword Solifrax. He had only to ask for Sabazian assistance, and it would begin. Danica had no doubt that he would, for whatever reason of his own, ask.
The oracle, probably. If the Sardians ever discovered that their sibyl, ancient when the city was founded, spoke with the voice of Ashtar …
The thought made her shift uneasily. She folded a corner of her cloak into a pillow. The grotto was scented with laurel, she noted; Atalia, no doubt, had mixed the leaves with the fresh rushes on the bench, preparing the shrine for Danica. Atalia, who thought little of Bellasteros, and less of the coming quest, but who nonetheless trusted implicitly in her queen and her goddess. As I trust, Danica said to herself. She reached out and stroked Lyris’s damp hair. The woman’s shoulders trembled.
Atalia had seen the soldier Hern among those men gathered for the autumn rites. Shandir had drawn him away, skillfully plucking information from his lips. He had been patrolling the supply lines along the Royal Road, he said, when he passed close by Sabazel; remembering the pleasures of the summer, he had ventured in. Shandir had smiled and nodded and said nothing. A spy, Atalia had said. Sent by Bellasteros.
Sent by Mardoc, I would think, Danica had replied. What could he see? Let him report that life in Sabazel proceeds
unaltered, turning to the rhythms of the year.
And the queen of Sabazel, Atalia had retorted, who did not join in the rites of autumn?
Too overwhelmed by the embraces of a god to accept those of a mere mortal. Now let the matter rest.
Her reply had been perhaps too close to the truth, Danica thought. Even Shandir’s gentle attentions no longer aroused her, and the thought of any other man’s touch repulsed her. If I cannot have Marcos Bellasteros, I will have no one. And she shuddered, rejecting that thought, too, before it could sink its talons into her mind.
Lyris looked up. Their eyes met. Wordlessly Danica opened her arms, and Lyris came into them, resting her head on Danica’s shoulder. “Your troubles, lady, are so much greater than mine.”
“Are they? Say instead that my duties are greater, and that greater disaster may result from my failure …”
Lyris waited a moment and, when Danica did not continue, said quietly, “You? How could you fail?”
Danica wished she could laugh. “So many ways, Lyris. So many ways. Our fate is netted with that of Bellasteros; if he fails, returning to Sardis like a whipped cur, Sabazel will be left at the mercy of a vengeful Empire. If he wins, and his followers learn of the child I carry … what then? What?”
Lyris had no reply.
The tiny flame in the lamp guttered, suddenly, as if in a long exhaled breath. Sistrums rattled in the dimness of the outer cavern. The walls of the grotto flickered in the dancing light, and Lyris looked up, startled. But she was reassured by Danica’s calm demeanor. “Are those paintings, on that wall there?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Danica. “Old ones, from the dawn of time.” A crescent moon overlooked stick figures of men and bison and deer. A male form wearing the antlers of a stag lay supine, surrounded by female figures bearing knives. “The winter king,” Danica explained, “sacrificed at the turning of the sun.”
“Is that the way it used to be here?” Lyris asked. Her widely dilated eyes gleamed.
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