by Tanith Lee
Shortly the slight weight in the sack was slighter.
And Liliu lay at his feet, under her black-red hair, shuddering with feeble hate and weakness.
“Well, it seems I may not kill you,” said Jadrid then, “but your life will doubtless be more irksome to you than the quick kindness of a sword. You shall be driven out into the mountains, or the swamps beyond the river’s delta. There live or die as you choose.”
“Oh, Jadrid,” said Liliu, lying under her hair, “you have made nothing of me, and I am powerless, but there is one further thing you must know.”
“Of you? I would rather hear the nightbird rattle, or the wind through a grating.”
“Remember,” said Liliu, “how we boasted, my brothers and sisters and I, in the tomb?”
“That I shall never forget. May you and your kind be forever accursed. As you are.”
“Remember how we toasted, in the liquors of men, our success?”
“Foul bitch, you sicken me. Can I cut out your tongue, now? And shall 1? I have heard enough.”
“Not quite enough. Did you never wonder to which success we alluded?”
“Your ability to deceive mankind.”
“Not merely. For all its wisdom, my race, so close-bred as it is, cannot bear children of its own loins, unless the seed of our men be sprinkled in a human woman’s womb, or the wombs of our women quickened by the seed of human men.”
Jadrid stood then like the stone. In his hands, her severed shadow shrank lighter and lighter. Liliu lay before him, seeming shrunken and fragile, too, her hair and skin very dull, her long talons all broken. But her voice remained to devil him. Her voice said:
“Oh Jadrid, you may work against me as you will, but your son is in my body. How shall you deal with him?”
The third mage had gone away. The household of the merchant-lord deliberated, and perhaps not sensibly.
It is hard for a man to outlaw his firstborn.
They locked her in an apartment of the lower building. Loyal servants of the merchant and his son, these tended her. It was quite safe for them to do so. For sure, the vampire-ghoul-devil Liliu was wasted now, and burning down like a flame which had no oil to nurture it. Like a blood-red flower without sap, she paled and failed. Her wits seemed addled, she was an idiot. The merchant’s son never visited her. But every day the women must make a report to him on how the child fared within her—for each day, as she flickered and sank, her womb grew larger. Strangely, the sunlight seemed no longer to trouble her. She had lost the precious part of herself; there was nothing else to scorch away.
At length, the labor began, there in the locked room. A while before daybreak, she brought forth.
They came to tell Jadrid. The devil-creature was dead, all flaccid, like an empty garment. Its hair had turned colorless and its teeth fallen out, and when they moved it the bones clinked together under the loose skin, like coins in a pot.
But the child—oh the child.
Jadrid said to his father, “I will go now and look at the child and make my decision. It has in its veins, after all, the blood of the living dead. How else could its atoms have unnaturally survived, with the mother’s death, dismemberment, burning? If it is like her, then it is hers, and must be destroyed.”
And the merchant, gazing at his son’s cold graven face, did not argue.
So Jadrid went down through the house and came into the room where now the sun flamed golden. And there the child lay in a patch of sunlight. It was a beautiful boy. Flawlessly formed, already with a look of intelligence and perception in the tiny face, the great eyes. Its skin was transparent pale as the sheerest paper; its hair, for already there was hair upon its scalp, was darkest red.
Jadrid bent over the child, frowning and cruel, and stretched out his hand from which the forefinger had been bitten. But three sound fingers remained, and the boy lifted his small arms and, laughing, grasped the middle one of these in both fists. “Oh my son,” said Jadrid. “You are also mine.”
And as he took up the baby in his arms, the sun ripened in the window like an apple of fire.
4
“NOW,” BEGAN the storyteller, “when some years had gone by—”
“Enough,” said Sovaz. “Your story is predictable, and the remainder I discern. Darkness has grown pale, listening to you.”
It was a fact. Another morning was near.
The man, though, looked angrily at Sovaz, who had by now broken all her bonds, and sat before him in that rock hole like night’s bright symbol.
“If you can fathom the rest, then say the rest,” he muttered.
“Very well. Though some of the fraternity of nine perished, some did not, while all the babies were sentimentally spared. These then grew up”—she spoke of this strangely, cruelly; she had had no childhood herself—“and less and less were the foolish parents able to refuse them. At last these ghoul children came to adult estate, and each exercised all the habits of the ghoul parent, and next drove the human parents out, or suborned them, took charge of the city, and warped or won it to their own graveyard ways. And they have by now no doubt spawned other ghoul infants by consent, seduction, and rape. And meanwhile they renamed the place for their manner of portioning the dead they devour, and other spoil they take. And you, old man, are Jadrid, once the wife-seeker.”
“Woman,” he said, “do you jeer at me? You have snapped the cords we bound you with, but we have greater magics. Mighty is Shudm, City of the Portioners. It draws hosts and companies to itself, to be its fodder. They come they know not why. Fat merchants and brawny robbers, the entourage of lady and sage, Shudm sucks them in across the plain. Shudm is always hungry and always fed. But even the lone traveler is welcome. And I will be rewarded for you. Look. Where is the omission from my finger? I have none. As a gift, my son gave to me the digit of an emperor, and this finger has been mine some years, though this priceless ring, another of his gifts, hides the adhesion.”
“Since you are yet your son’s friend,” said Sovaz, “why warn me from the way?”
“That is my humanity,” said old Jadrid. “Such mobs arrive, we can afford now and then to be merciful. But the stubborn ones and the jeering ones we take to them, even into the ghoul city of Shudm, for their pleasure.”
And then the rags fell from him and from his accomplices. They were clad in some magnificence, of a tawdry sort, but many of them were revealed as crouching monkey things, not men at all. Then Jadrid spoke to the ropes that had bound Sovaz, and they coiled about her and held her fast again, and at another word of his they became steel.
“You are a witch,” said Jadrid with venom, “but your small sorcery cannot match the sorcery of their kind. As I have discovered. Come now. We are going to the city.” At that the monkey creatures snatched Sovaz and bore her away, by leaping bounds, down the sheer mountain ledges toward the plain. A human girl might well have died of fear. But Sovaz kept her own counsel, made no resistance, and uttered no word.
All day tirelessly they traveled over that blanched bare plain, until, near sunset, they reached a great cemetery. Every tomb of it was despoiled and the earth upturned everywhere, and bones hanging in the trees. Beyond this horrid area stood up the city walls, with the river beyond, but the river was thick and dull, though the red dying of the sun smeared on it. High in the fading sky carrion birds wheeled around, and in the dead trees where the bones hung, and on the wrecked tombs, such birds had chosen their perches, and stood watching with baleful eyes, and one or two of them held perhaps in its beak a human hand, or a hank of human hair.
And the closer you came to the city, the better you heard the sounds of it, the wild strains of pipes and cymbals, or laughter, or loud cries. And its smell filled the atmosphere, of burning resins and sticky oils, and smoke, and under and over all, the tincture of death.
The gates of the city were shut, but it seemed Jadrid had been spied approaching, and in a few moments, the portal was drawn wide. They went through, the old man and his company of m
en and unmen, with Sovaz hurried along in their midst.
Whatever it once had been, it was a dark city now, Shudm. The streets were black, narrow, straight, and of many corner turnings, and on each side blind black stone platforms went up, and the black tiers of the buildings, out of which dark windows stared. Here and there dark columns arose, carved and gilded, and bearing the writing of several tongues—which Sovaz might read, but which told only the lineage and legends of the ghouls, whom they had conquered and how mighty they were—in terms that seemed always lying. And sometimes, set in the walls were grinning or silently howling masks made of black bronze, with the greenish corpse phosphorus inside them. From the doors and porticos of palaces and temples, or the buildings which had been such in the days when men ruled the city, issued terrible groans and screamings and the notes of blades, whips, mallets, and other instruments of torture and butchery.
Few persons traversed the streets. Those that passed were muffled and veiled, but as Jadrid’s gang went by, there would come a glint of eyes or pallid greedy snouts turning to look after. Now and then a livid hand would pluck at Jadrid’s sleeve, and the nails of the hand would be long and pointed. But Jadrid never halted, nor his attendants, and the captive was borne on with them. It was a route they had borne many captives, no doubt. Soon, some of the veiled and muffled ones stole after them, hissing to each other softly, pawing the darkness, but respectfully not slinking very near.
What did she think, Sovaz, having allowed herself to be brought to this grisly slough?
Make no mistake, her thoughts were not those of a frightened girl, or even of a sly and arrogant sorceress. Pressured by the emanations of this hellhole, her brain had become purely demonic. She was all demon, now. Therefore, not to be read.
At length they came into an open square which descended on one side to the sewerlike river. The space was dominated by a huge black edifice, lacking windows and all apertures but an entrance, this being formed as a vast and mindless face, and in the face a gaping mouth crowded by fangs of stone. Within was a red light. And up the stair to it, and through and under the fanged mouth, and into the redness, they bore Sovaz. And so into a hall more like a colossal chimney than any other thing, the walls of it soaring up to a roof lost beyond the hectic flames of the torches that burned there. But now and again a shadow crossed the vault above and a shriek came down, or a dry black feather: The carrion birds of the city flew freely also here. The lower part of the hall was decorated with every gaudy and expensive item imaginable that might be obtained from the hoard of a sarcophagus. Among the inlaid screens and gemmy hangings, on carved couches and embroidered rugs, sat or lay a quantity of men and women, all alike for their paleness and their dark cinnabar hair. Their clothing, though costly, was as rabidly unaesthetic as the rest. Some even affected graveclothes. (It was perhaps foolish to expect good taste among ghouls.) Their pet slaves, who walked or crawled about among them, were naked, that the owners might the better caress and savor the flesh, sometimes even gently biting at it. One of the ghoul princes had stationed himself before a ten-foot pitcher of glass within which a woman had been drowned in wine. She floated, in a cloud of hair, and the ghoul prince, turning a tap in the side of the glass, drew a cup of this concoction. But having sampled it, he declared the brew not yet ready to be drunk.
From which it would appear these, who had human blood mingled with the other, could tolerate wine and such human refreshments, though their preference was clearly for traditional delicacies. Likewise, no doubt, the sun did not harm or inconvenience them very much (in the story, the baby had been left lying in a patch of sunlight), though, no doubt again, they avoided the rays on principle if left to themselves—there was a decided sense of the new day in the night-time city, sunset being still dawn to them. (Part demon, all demon at this moment, she could hardly miss it.)
But now the ghoul who had tasted the wine turned and gazed fixedly at Jadrid. Jadrid fell down on his face.
“Beloved son,” whined Jadrid, “see what dainty I found for you, in the mountains.”
“By my dead mother’s shadow,” said the ghoul, “you have earned for yourself a sojourn in the city by this. For all the thousands I have sampled, here is one in thousands.” And he came to Sovaz at once and looked at her and stroked her.
Presently the ghoul said, “And are you not afraid? Do you not understand your destiny, here?”
Sovaz smiled. The ghoul checked. He was unused to such attitudes. “You may,” said Sovaz, “tell me what you think it to be.”
“So lovely,” said the ghoul. “I believe I will delay and keep you one night and day alive. But when another sunset comes, some means will be devised for your slow death, at which I, and my brothers and sisters, will preside. Then we will dine upon you, as is our way. But I shall keep this hair,” said the ghoul fondly, playing with a long coil of it, “to edge some fine robe I possess. And your beautiful eyes shall be set in crystal. I shall wear them as rings, and remember you often, and lovingly. Indeed, I may compose a song upon your merits and render your name immortal. What is your name?”
All about, the others of the fellowship, who had been looking on jealously, now tittered and whispered. It was not often they asked a dish upon the table how it was named. An honor for that dish. But the honored one seemed not to realize her bliss.
“My name is nothing to you,” said Sovaz, “and your song nothing to me. Nor your night and day of delaying, nor your diet. I am only taking my leisure here, considering what I shall do with you.”
Then, there was distinguishable another tone, another voice, in hers. You are all my daughter, Azhrarn had said. This moment you might hear how true it was.
Yet the City of Portionings had forgotten Underearth, or thought itself to be demonkind (mankind had occasionally confused the two races). The ghoul prince only widened his eyes and chuckled, captivated by insolence.
“Does the first sorcery still apply?” inquired Sovaz, in that voice still. “Nothing may injure your tribe—fire, blade, stone, bone?”
“Oh, yes, sweetheart. We are impervious to all such.”
“While to the sun you are somewhat inured by reason of your mixed blood.”
“We tolerate but do not care for the sun, which is an ugly mistake of the gods.”
“And for your shadows?” said Sovaz, and her voice was nearly flirtatious.
“Behold,” said the ghoul, and he raised his arm so its black reflection fell across the torches to a painted screen. “They are now as the shadows of men, and have no substance. Go scrape at that one with a knife if you wish, and see.”
“How then,” said Sovaz, “may I kill you? Where is the vulnerable spot?”
“Ah,” said the ghoul, “do not trouble your pretty head with that. Ponder rather how I shall deal with you.”
And he took her hand and kissed it and mouthed it, and softly tongued her flesh. Sovaz did nothing to prevent him. So confident, Shudm city, not one of them grasped meekness was never so meek.
“Dear Father,” said the ghoul prince, “for this diversion brought me by you, I will feed you myself, from my own board.”
Jadrid groveled. Yet the little graveworms and beetles, which still kept house in some of the floor coverings, may have seen his eyes as he writhed there, upsetting their domestic arrangements. And the eyes of Jadrid had a peculiar expression.
Sovaz said to the ghoul, “So you instruct humanity that it too eats human flesh, here?”
“We are never stingy. We feed our flocks and herds as well as we feed ourselves. And they get a taste for it. The old fellow there, he will be dreaming of what I shall give him of yours. But I shall keep you all for myself, and for a certain sister I am affectionate with.”
Then he led her away through the chimneylike hall, while his kin made signs of humor and envy. They passed then through a door into an underground tunnel—the city had always been riddled with them, and by means of them, even in the days of human rule, the ghouls had come and gone about the
ir business quite discreetly.
It was a black journey they now undertook, but the ghoul prince saw well in the dark, and, as he could have noted, so did his victim. Behind them stole only one of the monkey beasts, to guard the prisoner, or to denote the rank of the prince by its presence. Presently a stair, or a series of humped shelves, went up. Kicking aside ancient bones, the prince ascended, and Sovaz followed before the creature at her back should urge her to it. They came out into the basement of a palace by the river.
It was like no palace mentioned in the father’s tale. Little had been; the city was much altered. A riot, or some other mayhem, seemed to have passed through the building. It was gloomy and unclean, littered with breakages and also with those tasteless tomb goods the ghoul race loved. Shards of red glass clung in the windows. Phosphorus sputtered in the lamps. No sooner had they, by dint of climbing decaying staircases, reached the upper rooms, than by the shine of such illuminations Sovaz might see bony, hungry faces pressed at the openwork windows, and hear the scrabbling of long-clawed hands and feet venturing up the walls.
“Fear nothing from them,” said the ghoul prince. “They are part children of ours by humans, weaklings, having only a fraction of the true blood between them. They grow to our desires and appetites, but not to our strengths and beauties. We permit them to watch us, sometimes. It amuses us.”
But he conveyed Sovaz into a windowless cubby, the door of which he closed—the monkeylike attendant left outside—and so to a couch of rotting finery, overhung with curtains of golden stuff.
“Disrobe for me,” he said. “Let me see all the feast I shall have.”
Then Sovaz smiled once more, and something in that smile caused the prince to hesitate, though beyond the door, they at the sharded windows scrabbled and snuffled eagerly.
“As my lord desires,” said Sovaz.
And she untied her sash and unfastened her bodice, and as she did so, the whole garment fell away, and there emerged out of it something that was no longer so entrancing to this prince.
