The Rose of Sarifal

by Paulina Claiborne

  A puzzled frown knotted his white brow, and he opened his bright eyes, blinked, and sat up, a smile of happy recognition on his lips—she’d let go of his nose by this time, and squatted back on her heels.

  “My small friend,” he murmured, “how I am happy to see your face. These others were boring me—” which was as far as he got before he realized something terrible was happening. “Stop!” he shouted, leaping from his chair.

  Ughoth was wounded, his shoulders drenched in his blue blood, but he had gotten hold of two of the giant-spits, one in each hand, and with them he did deadly damage to his attackers, his yellow eye blazing fire. Marabaldia, also, had skewered several of the Llewyrr knights, though Askepel unfortunately (in Suka’s modest opinion) had escaped.

  “Stop!” shouted Mindarion again, as another of the unarmed fomorians went down. No one heard him or paid attention. But he lifted up his hand and grabbed the gnome’s shoulder, pulled her toward him, and told her to jump down and close the eyes of the sun, words which would have made no sense if Suka had not passed under the table earlier and seen its etched and painted twenty-foot-long underside, in contrast to its smooth marble top. She did as she was told, and had to duck to see the pattern that ran along the narrow ceiling; constellations, individual stars, the phases of the moon, and at the far end the likeness of the sun, its rays inset with gold, its face a human face surrounded by shaggy yellow hair and a shaggy beard, its eyes wide and deranged. Suka jammed her fingers into them, and pulled down the clockwork metal lids, which shut with a click that was audible to her even in the noise of the assault.

  One of the fomorians lay full length beside the dais, his purple face turned toward her, his lips wet with blood and distorted with death. He looked not so much like a creature who had ever been alive, but like a leather mask that had been painted to scare children at the solstice festival or the Feast of the Moon—Suka closed her eyes. She was without hope. All of this was her fault.

  But then she felt some movement, and opened her eyes to see the dais underneath the table start to turn, and the whole circular bottom of the council hall of Harrowfast turn like a screw, and sink down along a sloping, cylindrical shaft—slowly at first, and then at an increasing speed. Supported on iron wheels, revolving along a greased iron rail, the entire stone structure made a screeching noise and threw up sparks as it slid out of sight, away from the ring of enraged knights and down into the darkness. Lord Mindarion stood by the spinning table as if directing the descent, Altaira by his side. Marabaldia and Ughoth, also, had retreated to the table as it began to sink, and the two remaining fomorian guardsmen, all of them protected by the dark. As they slid down the long decline, they looked up to see the faces of the eladrin peering down at them. The air was full of dust and cobwebs and the screech of iron brakes.

  They slid down into the guts of Harrowfast, coming to rest finally on a bed of wrecked and rusted machinery, a system of clockwork pistons and counterweights, which Suka imagined had once driven the stone plug up and down its screw-shaped track, unused, perhaps, since the dwarves had fled more than a hundred years before. Light had followed them down the shaft, but the fomorians’ evil eyes were glowing now, spreading beams of yellow light around the chamber at the bottom of the track. They climbed down an iron ladder, Mindarion last of all.

  “Sir,” said Marabaldia, “once again you have saved our lives.”

  The old eladrin raised his hand to silence her. “Come,” he said, and led the way into the darkness down a sloping tunnel that led northeast, as far as Suka could tell after turning in so many circles.

  Ughoth carried the dead guardsman, but after a few minutes he laid him down by the side of the passage, then took his time in getting up, because he was hurt. The guardsmen were carrying the giant-spits. Ughoth was on his hands and knees, and then with a shake of his great head he pushed himself upright and rose unsteadily, supporting himself on the brick wall. Marabaldia watched him, but there was nothing to be done; they had to move.

  “Will they chase us?” she asked.

  Mindarion smiled. “Eventually, but they hate the dark.”

  No lie. White-faced, Altaira looked around, not reassured, Suka guessed, by the fomorians’ glowing eyes. Down here, the air was warm and stale and hard to breathe.

  “We’ll have to continue,” said Marabaldia. “What about the others?” Meaning, Suka supposed, the company they had left in Harrowfast.

  Out of breath, Ughoth smiled. Sweat dripped from his broad face. “Give me a moment,” he insisted.

  His cream-colored shirt was cut to ribbons over his enormous shoulders, but Suka suspected a deeper injury where he’d clasped his hand over his stomach, and his dark blood made a deeper stain. She wondered why Marabaldia didn’t go to him, didn’t touch him or ask him whether he was well, or make any of the small, useless, comforting gestures smaller folk might have made. Only she stood watching him with an unbearably rich expression on her face, heart-struck and proud, and hopeful and resigned all at the same time. And the gnome realized also, inconsequentially, that they were still virgins to each other, even after all this time, and the extreme delicacy of the way they treated one another was evidence of a connection too deep for her to understand.

  “Give me a moment,” Ughoth said, and, gathering strength, he inflated his great lungs to their fullest, and pressed out a shuddering low note that rose in volume and resonance until the walls started to throb, and Suka and Altaira clasped their hands over their ears. It went on and on, growing in power until Suka imagined it might dislodge the bricks above their heads, imagined also, far above, the cyclopses pausing and gathering and conferring, not because they had actually heard the sound, but because it had caused a motion in the dark, secret, interior tunnels of their brains.

  It gave out finally in a series of grunting coughs. Ughoth had blood on his lips. “Come,” Marabaldia said gently, and without touching him she granted him some of her strength, enough to push himself away from the wall and walk with her, side by side, forward into the darkness, pierced by their yellow, evil eyes.

  The guardsmen followed them, and only Altaira hung back. “Courage, daughter,” said Mindarion. “Surely you can recognize courage, even if you can’t feel it,” he said, which seemed to Suka unduly harsh given the circumstances. The three of them lagged behind as if from some unspoken decision. “I am disgusted by my own kind,” murmured the old eladrin. “It is a curse to live so long. The curse of the fey, and my people are the worst, because we live the longest. After these centuries, we lose so much of what it means to be alive—not just love, and friendship, and suffering, and kindness, but also art and music. Instead it is the mere shell that persists, by which I mean pride, and snobbery, and self-interest, and cold intelligence—even that will dwindle over time. In Lord Askepel’s case it is almost gone, I fear. So I apologize for him.”

  No need, thought Suka. I also apologize, she thought, looking miserably up ahead after the fomorians, after the lumbering dance of light in the black tunnel.

  “Is it any wonder, finally, that we search out darkness?” continued the old fey. “We turn inward to ourselves, chase death through the corridors of our bodies—it is too quick for us to catch. Even beyond death sometimes we search for it.”

  “I’ve heard,” murmured Suka.

  “Yes! But that will not be my fate. Many thanks, my little friend, for what you did inside my nose, though the scratches already have begun to heal. In the woods above Caer Corwell, when I fought with the darkwalker, she showed me the empty spaces within myself, and that was what terrified me. But this is what I will do: I will walk away from Synnoria, walk away from Karador, walk away from Sarifal, and I will find something.”

  “Father—” began Altaira.

  “You need not accompany me,” he continued, “if you are afraid.”

  She was afraid, Suka thought. Tears dripped down her cheeks. And Suka imagined, though she was weeping for herself, that she was also the outlet or opening or vent f
or Marabaldia’s tears, which otherwise could not show themselves. Up ahead, the two royal fomorians strolled side by side, though Ughoth moved slower and slower as he weakened, and she slowed with him, and all the others slowed as well, to leave them space. Finally, they were barely moving.

  And then they stopped. Under the brick vault, Marabaldia helped Ughoth to lie down. Even now she didn’t hug him or embrace him, but sat holding his hand while the lights that had been separate, and the yellow beams that had been parallel, now glowed as one, as their evil eyes combined. They were looking at each other, and Marabaldia bent down, as if to get a closer look. As Suka watched, the light that had redoubled now redimmed to one, as Ughoth closed his eye.

  In time, Suka moved up between the two soldiers, who stood on each side of the passageway, facing each other as if on guard, their spears extended at an angle. Behind her she could hear the iron-shod tramp of the cyclopses as they marched down from Harrowfast. Suka squatted beside Marabaldia, whose face was calm and placid. Together they watched the bright lights of the arriving company, their banner limp in the flat air—the torch in the purple fist, the sign of Ughoth’s house.

  “I wonder if you might sing for me … a couple of verses of Oh, Father Dear,” said Marabaldia.

  “Heck,” muttered the gnome. “I’ll sing you the whole thing.”

  A REUNION

  THERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT WAYS FOR A DRUID TO MOVE back and forth between her animal and human shapes, depending on her circumstances and her state of mind. These skills are studied as a science, but mastered as an art, and like all arts, this one grew out of an inner soil of fears, desires, and needs. When Eleuthra was learning, back when it was painful to transform, to feel her bones reknit, her skin stretch and sag, sometimes she would isolate a single part of her body, a finger, first, and then a hand. She’d feel that she had thrust her hand into a fire. When she looked down to see the hair sprout and grow, she imagined that her skin was burning with a black flame. Later on, she learned to love the feeling, too intense almost to bear. Later on she’d feel a shudder in her flesh, and the hair would spread like a wave out of an underwater quake. An abrupt shock, and she would change all at once, as if from the inside out, in an ecstasy that was almost sexual. Sometimes she’d lose consciousness just for a moment. When she was frightened or in urgent need, then she’d lose consciousness, or else enter a peculiar fugue in which quick intervals of oblivion were mixed with intervals of hyperfocused awareness, the more surreal for being interrupted. And in the unconscious moments she would dream, and her dream, also, would suffer from the same sequence of interruptions.

  Now in extremity, with the drow closing in, her wolf’s shape erupted out of her and she fell down on all fours into a crouch. But at the same time she dreamed a series of tiny, encapsulated dreams, each one large on the inside, tiny on the outside. She saw the daemonfey above her as if lit by intermittent flashes of lighting, now in one place, now in another, now naked, now clothed, now as she remembered him on Moray Island where they had found shelter, now as she imagined him in dreams or fantasies. Sometimes he spoke to her, though the movement of his lips did not conform to the words she heard, which were always versions of what he’d said to her earlier, when she’d been asleep: “Come to me. Give up and come to me. Dare to leave this place and come to me.” At the same time, even in the moments she was conscious and aware, then also she remembered him as if in a series of afterimages, which enabled her to superimpose him on the surface of the real world, almost as if he hovered above her in the dark cavern where they were surrounded by drow, and where the hierophant of Lolth conjured her magic, silhouetted by the fire burning in the entrance of her shrine, between the broken statues of the knight at the basilisk, and the curtain of flame that moved across the surface of the rock.

  Eleuthra’s body changed rapidly and completely, as if in a series of orgasmic shudders, and as she looked up from her wolf’s crouch she saw the daemonfey as if suspended above the hierophant, his barbed tail hanging down as if to touch the dark elf’s black and white streaked hair, which writhed and twisted around her delicate, small head as if it had an independent life, a trick, perhaps, of the lashing wind. Eleuthra heard a roaring in her ears: “Come to me.”

  Gaspar-shen, his scimitar in his right hand, a short sword in his left, his bare torso glowing with a lambent, frustrated energy that snaked around his chest and arms and belly in blue lines, watched the she-wolf in the moment of her spring, watched her dig her claws into the rocks, watched the hair rise on her body and the thick ridge of her spine as if charged with static. He himself found it hard to move, because the drow witch had conjured away his strength and Lukas’s also. Swords drawn, they also stood like stones, waiting for the seven warriors to surround them and conquer them, while the rest of the dark elves waited behind. But the wolf felt nothing of that conjuring, designed to immobilize more complicated brains, and as she broke across the rocky, uneven floor, he also felt the magic strain and snap—the witch could not sustain it and defend herself at the same time. Lukas also jerked alive, as if suddenly released from the constraints of an invisible net, and with his sword raised he leaped upon the closest of the drow, insolently sauntering toward him, protected—so he must have thought—by the hierophant’s spell. The blade bit into his skull. He dropped like a bag of sand, and Lukas, spinning, caught the warrior next to him with a back-handed slash across his throat then drove his sword’s point through someone else’s eye.

  Someone must tell him, the genasi thought, of the benefits of striking below the neck, where the target was larger and softer. His own scimitar, he noticed, had punctured the belly of one of these treacherous creatures, popped it like an inflated bladder, and now he turned to the next. These drow had no culture, he thought grimly, as he severed one dark elf’s arm from his body—they overcooked their vegetables and undercooked their meat, and boiled too many pale tubers, and relied too heavily on spiced sauces and hot oil, or so he’d heard. They baked no bread, made no pastry. There was no lightness to their cuisine, and now, by the gods, they’d pay for it.

  Amaranth threw down her lamp. It shattered on the rocks and spattered a blue, glowing liquid. Likewise released from the magic, she drew the short sword she had carried from Caer Moray, and as the drow raged close she struck then jumped back. Surprised, she saw Amaka was still with her and, though unarmed, had seized one of the drow’s arms as she pressed her blade between his ribs, watched the hot blood flow down. Under the hierophant’s spell, all time seemed to have slowed and thickened. Now, released from it, she felt a burst of frantic energy, as if gravity were weak, as if the air were thin and offered no resistance, and as if all the processes of her body were quick beyond control. It could not last. Lukas was cutting through the drow as if through scarecrows, and the genasi had raised a barrier of murdered corpses, some of which still twitched erratically. There were several dozen drow at least, but they fell back from the onslaught of the blades. It could not last.

  Eleuthra had reached the creature, drawn her claws down her face and neck, opened up her flesh and then sprung for her throat, and missed. Instead her jaws had closed on the hierophant’s shoulder, cracking her collarbone and her upper arm, such was the fury of the wolf’s assault. She’d fallen on her prey like a crashing wave, but like a wave, now, she drew back after marking her high tide. As she did, she felt the hierophant’s magic reinvest itself, flow into the spaces she had left, fasten itself around her like a living chain, squeeze her chest so she couldn’t breathe, and all her struggles drew it closer. Desperate, she struck again, cutting with her heavy paws, and this time she felt the softness of the drow’s breast, and tried to cut through that and through her ribs and through the plastron of her chest to reach her heart. But the wolf could no longer breathe. She released her grip on the hierophant’s arm so she could strike again, and miss again, and now her jaws closed upon nothing, and instead she felt a coldness overtake her lungs, like a cold liquid poison injected in her viscera, causi
ng the failure of her organs one by one, and the closing of her body processes until only her heart was left, fluttering in a bath of ice.

  “Come to me,” said the daemonfey, and she saw him spread his leather wings until he filled the entire vault of the cavern, his red eyes diabolical, his gold skin and body perfect in her mind. “Come to me.”

  And she went.

  The hierophant stepped back from the wolf’s corpse. Staggering, she fell against the statue of the knight, seizing the haft of its stone sword to stay upright. The blood flowed down her arms and face. But she was in a rage. She lifted her uninjured arm, and Gaspar-shen felt the air congeal around him, slowing his weapon and offering resistance as he drew it back and raised it up to strike. It seemed too heavy for his strength. One of the drow caught him by the arm and pulled him forward, and he realized suddenly they were not trying to kill him but disarm him, capture him alive. Again he struck at them, the circle of black faces which were close enough for him to see the silver rings in their nostrils and lips and in the ridges of their ears, even the scarified, raised patterns on their cheeks, even their filed and pointed teeth as they grinned at him in fury and drew him down.