The Rose of Sarifal

by Paulina Claiborne

  After a moment he flopped helpless as if resting on a bed of slaughtered bodies, pinioned at his wrists, while at the same time he heard the noise of the hierophant’s harsh breath next to his ear, and he felt her hands fumbling over his chest, and smelled her blood dripping over him. Nor did he have to hear her tell him that a spider must immobilize her prey with a cold bite, before wrapping it in pale cords to save for later, when she is hungry. The eating habits of spiders, he had always thought, should not be emulated by any higher being with a claim to civilization.

  Far above, in the fomorian highway that ran under the Cambro Mountains from Harrowfast in the south and all the way to Winterglen, Suka rode on Marabaldia’s shoulder. Sixty miles they had come in just a day. The princess seemed to gather and grow in strength as time progressed. Suka was exhausted even so. She had not wanted to be carried like a sack of potatoes, but every stride of the giantess was four of hers. And she had not expected they would never stop, or pause, or rest, or eat, or drink, hour after hour. Irritated, she had never complained, which was unlike her. But the mystery was easy to solve.

  Suka felt the weight of Ughoth’s death, caused, she imagined, by her own clumsiness on the borders of Synnoria. And she imagined, in this punishing pace, that Marabaldia was working something out, expressing some profound emotion. Suka didn’t blame her for wanting to move quickly, leave the surface of Gwynneth Island, and burrow down deep into the Underdark. She would deny the princess nothing for the sake of her own dignity, so grateful she was that Marabaldia hadn’t punished her, or even questioned her about what had happened between her and Captain Rurik and the Marchlord Talos-claere in Synnoria. She could only remember how her friend, and Ughoth too, had backed her without question in the council hall, supported her without hesitation when Lord Askepel had demanded that she stand trial, and answer for what she and Rurik actually had done, the mistakes she actually had made. Even now, even after the price she’d paid, Marabaldia did not question her. It was as if the past were gone, and Suka were the only one still carrying its burden.

  They had not paused, neither to draw breath nor drink some water from one of the subterranean streams. Long used to human beings, now Suka had grown accustomed to the heavy stamp of the cyclopses, though she could not hope to copy its rhythm. Their single eyes glowed like lanterns. She looked back to see Mindarion and Altaira, similarly carried. Behind them, the tunnel was in darkness.

  When the venom wore off and Lukas regained consciousness, he guessed the drow had taken him in through the cave mouth where he’d first seen the hierophant, in between the shattered statues where Amaka had first tried to lead them. And in this new cave he found himself bound to a stone pier, perched unsteadily atop a mound of architectural refuse; iron spars, chunks of fallen masonry, loose bricks and coping stones, enormous wooden beams. All of this had been arranged around a hollow well, and the entire circular pile was alive with scurrying vermin, rats and lizards, but especially spiders, who wove their webs in the interstices, or else hung suspended from the pinnacles of stone. The mound of debris rose almost twenty feet from the cave floor, and the interior well descended through a crack or a crevice to a depth he could not guess, as it was choked with garbage and old bones, and layers of moon-white web as thick as mats. Entire bricks were caught in them and did not fall. Light came from the gas vents in the burning rocks, and from the bottom of the well—a diffuse pale glow. Light came also from a makeshift altar at the top of the pile, an assortment of marble slabs, and urns and reliquaries that looked to have been looted from some other shrine, all surmounted by a cylinder of black, polished stone, which supported a circle of brass candlesticks, and fat, white, flickering tapers shedding beads of melted wax.

  Gaspar-shen lay nearby, trussed as he was in silken, sticky ropes. Lady Amaranth was below the altar, tied down by her wrists and ankles. It occurred to Lukas that he had been in this place before, or else this situation, and then he remembered the lush temple where they had all come to Gwynneth Island, the gate whose other side was in the Breasal Marsh. The druid—Eleuthra—had been with them, and here she was again. As Lukas watched, a detachment of the drow marched from the cave’s mouth, carrying the bodies not just of the druid but of their fallen comrades. Unsteadily they climbed the pile of rubble at its lowest point, and then tumbled the corpses down into the well, through a trap in the webs that looked as if it might have been woven for that purpose. Last of all they flung Eleuthra, dressed in her wolf skin, in her human shape.

  She had scarcely known them, but she had given her life for theirs—in vain, as it turned out, because here they were, prisoners just the same. Why had she done this? It was for the Savage’s sake, he guessed. It was for love.

  The drow seemed eager to finish and be gone. One or two glanced anxiously into the bottom of the well before they retreated to the cave’s mouth. Lukas waited for the genasi to speak.

  “In the desert realm of Calim,” Gaspar-shen began diffidently after clearing his throat—the air was thick and humid and full of dust, “there is a town called Calimpest. But they have nothing to eat.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. They have nothing to eat.”

  “Surely they have bread.”

  “No bread. Only pieces of stone, which they suck until they are smooth.”

  “And … is there anything to drink?”

  “Nothing. Only fine white sand.”

  “And the inhabitants of Calim … are they happy?”

  “No, they are not happy. They are very sad. All night long they howl and complain.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “No one blames them. It has been this way for many years.”

  “How many years?”

  “More than six years. Fewer than seven.”

  Lady Amaranth was too far away to hear this nonsense, but someone else was not. Turning his head, Lukas saw the handmaiden of Lolth sitting above him, hands clasped around her knees. It was Amaka, the girl who had betrayed them and led them to this place. Yet she looked disconsolate, soot in her close-cropped white hair, her face streaked with dirt, her white shift streaked and torn.

  “Does he speak seriously?” she asked.

  “No one knows.”

  “Yet I,” she said, “would rather live in Calim than in Winterglen among my own kind. Calim is a paradise to me.”

  During their battle with the drow, Lukas had seen this girl fighting beside Amaranth, hampering the drow soldiers who attacked her. Why was that?

  She could not read minds, he knew. Yet she answered him as if she could. “I couldn’t bear to see her harried so, like that, like a hart inside a circle of dogs. That’s what I felt—the truth. But what I told that woman, the guardian of the shrine, I told her I was protecting the blood of the leShay. I didn’t want to see it spilled prematurely, see it sink into the dust. That is why I brought you to this place, isn’t it?”

  For a moment she seemed unsure. “I wouldn’t know,” Lukas said. He looked up to see the eyes of his friend—tied down, helpless, away from him and to the left—watching him. In the mix of light, harsh and soft, dirty and clean, the genasi’s skin looked as pale and slick and unhealthy as a fish’s belly.

  “It is the blood of the leShay,” confirmed the girl. “My father lied to you. He wouldn’t send her south to Synnoria. He wanted her brought here, because this is the place—this is the place …”

  She paused for a moment, then went on, “This is the place where he intends to raise my lady out of the Abyss.” Then she laid her cheek upon her knees, hugging her shins within the circle of her black arms.

  “Araushnee,” Lukas murmured.

  “Araushnee,” she repeated. “They have tried and failed, tried and failed here for months. The guardian has worn through an entire circuit of the lady’s rituals, over and over. But it was her idea—she could entice her with the rarest blood in Faerûn, and Araushnee would answer to the smell of it, as if she were some predatory creature and not a goddess or
a queen.”

  “Silly,” Lukas murmured, too softly for the girl to hear.

  “It’s so silly,” she continued without irony, as if she knew his thoughts but not his mind. “Her spider’s nature is the curse Corellon laid on her. She yearns to cast it away, reject it and be free. When we speak of our desire to live again on the surface in the forest of Winterglen, simple wood elves like our ancestors, it is so we also can share in a goddess’s aspiration, and be more than creatures fighting in a hole. This is why she did not come, not until now. We should be looking for her in the shrine I built for her—you saw it—and not here in a pit of corpses and carrion, stinking of sulfur and decay. This is an insult.”

  Tears were in her eyes, Lukas saw, touched in spite of himself. He had heard different stories of Araushnee’s fall and the emergence of Lolth from the Demonweb Pits. He wouldn’t think about those stories now.

  “It is so easy to fall back into old habits,” said the girl. How beautiful her voice was—he had not noticed until now. “Creatures in a hole, hiding and fighting. But if we are to walk among the moon and stars, surely we must change. Come back to what we were, long ago, in the simple time. Captain,” she said, surprising Lukas, who had thought she was speaking mostly to herself. “Captain, that is why it hurts me so to see you like this, you and her. Among the drow, our men don’t treat our women with affection, as you have treated her.”

  She meant the princess. “Is that what it is?” murmured Lukas, too low for her to hear. He was watching the genasi, who blinked once, slowly. Gentle mockery, Lukas guessed. Maybe that was also what Amaka was talking about. She probably didn’t see enough of that among the drow.

  “Well, if it hurts you so,” he said, “and if you’re sure it’s useless, you could let us go.”

  Her expression, when she looked at him, was so panicked he could not continue. “Where is the priestess now?” he said, meaning the hierophant.

  “Hurt. Too hurt to conclude the ritual. Mauled by Eleuthra Davos, and by … someone else. Crouching in her own little pit, too hurt to come out.”

  “Like a spider,” Lukas said.

  “Like a spider.”

  Amaka rose to her feet. Unsteady on the shattered, uneven surface, she came a few steps closer. When he had first seen her up above, Lukas had wondered if she was drunk or drugged, her spirits were so high, but there was no trace of that now.

  She stood above him then flopped down on a chunk of marble, part of the facing stone of some ornate structure, a cornice or a frieze carved in a pattern of birds in flight. But because it had been slaved up from some broken palace in the Underdark, the birds themselves were fantastical and impossible, with tiny wings and long, curled bills and claws—mythical beasts carved by someone who had never seen the sky.

  She bent down over him. “Do you think,” she said, “that if my sisters and I make our home … among the trees in Winterglen … above our heads, then we will find someone to treat us the way you treat … her?”

  Lukas watched the genasi’s eyes. They blinked once, slowly.

  “Free me,” Lukas muttered, though he found he could not lie to her, even though she had betrayed them. She had obeyed her father, that was all. How could he find fault with her? Not that he had ever obeyed his own father much, come to think of it.

  Still, he pitied her. He could not lie to her. “I haven’t kept her all that well,” he muttered, wondering first whether his connection to Amaranth looked different from the outside than it did from the inside, and second whether anyone who knew how he had lured her back to Gwynneth Island and then lured her down here, would still say he had done the best he could for her. What did it mean anyway to treat someone well, in what had been, since he had known her, a series of disasters?

  “Free me,” he muttered as Amaka bent over him, her pretty face a few inches from his own—prettier, actually, than he remembered. The dirt was gone from her cheeks. Her eyes were closed. Again, thought Lukas, what this looked like was different from what it was. She was too innocent to know what she was talking about, and anyway he could scarcely move, so maybe none of it meant anything.

  Besides, all of an instant, he got the distinct impression she was mocking him, and had been mocking him all along, with her talk about drow, and her desire for better treatment. Now he noticed how her shift was held together—by a brooch or a needle on her right shoulder. He did not remember seeing it before. And now he could see the sharp end of it protruding from the fine white linen cloth—finer, actually, than he had thought. This part of it wasn’t ripped or stained. Close to his mouth, the other end was fashioned in the shape of a spider, a beautiful ornament of silver chased with gold. He caught it between his teeth and pulled it away from her, and the garment parted. Without opening her eyes, she reached up her hand to secure it over her breast.

  But he didn’t pay any attention to that. Instead he pressed his chin against his neck and bent himself to the intricate task of picking apart the silken cord that bound his arms to the stone pier—little by little. He held the sharp silver needle between his teeth. He scarcely noticed when the light around them changed, became brighter and softer and less full of smoky fire. He had managed to loosen himself and sit forward a little bit, pry himself upright, the needle hurting his mouth, when he heard a sound from Gaspar-shen, a whimper of amazement, a soft noise whistling through complicated nasal cavities, and he looked up.

  Amaka had climbed up to the shrine where Amaranth was laid out. She stood on the topmost ridge of garbage with the rats around her feet. They did not seem alarmed. One went up on his hind legs, poked his little nose in the air, curled up his tail between his legs and around his fat, purselike body. Amaka brought her hand from her right shoulder, stretched it palm up toward the candles, which burned now with a purer, bluer flame—the wind had died. Her garment—whether it was just a trick of the new light, Lukas didn’t see any more rents or tears in it, or any dirt and filth. The cloth itself seemed transfigured—the garment wafted to the ground. “There was a time when I would gladly have accepted these gifts,” she said. “These offerings. Not now. Not today. Not from these hands.

  “Besides,” she said, “I have already eaten. I have no more room.”

  She was not altogether naked. Silhouetted by the candlelight, she seemed made of darkness, a girl-shaped hole in the world’s protective screen. Lukas watched her lean down over Lady Amaranth and run her forefinger over her forehead, her cheek, and down her neck. The princess, who had been unconscious or asleep, now roused herself, came awake under the black hand. Lukas saw Amaranth press against her bonds, heard her little moan. But she had not yet opened her eyes by the time Amaka turned from her, and stepped over the lip of the abyss, and climbed down out of sight into the well.

  Lukas said nothing, the needle between his teeth. Gaspar-shen blinked twice, in quick succession. Lady Amaranth struggled weakly against her restraints, cried out as if she had been hurt. Lukas bent down to his task again, worrying and picking at the pale strands. He worked faster now, hurting his mouth and not caring, because he wanted, once loose, to climb up to the rim of garbage and at least look down into the well, past where Amaka had descended, taking some of the radiance with her. The air was darker now. One of the strands gave way, and then another. He pulled, and his hand was free.

  Gaspar-shen watched him extricate himself then stand painfully erect, rubbing his shoulders and his hands, wiping the blood from his mouth. He himself felt comfortable and secure, because he couldn’t move. In the Elemental Chaos where he had been born, these moments of stasis formed small islands of bliss, even in memory. Traveling with Lukas, there was far too little of this, and it was worth it to be hurt, sometimes, or imprisoned, or in danger of a terrible death, to enjoy a small bit of quietude sometimes. Closing his eyes, he could see the colors of the ocean, hear the roaring of the water.

  It couldn’t last. Lukas stood above him then knelt down as if to free him. But—and this was an astonishing thing, which made Gaspar
-shen think with a surge of gratitude that sometimes his friend almost understood him—instead he whispered in his ear, his eyes on the leShay princess waking up. “Stay right here—” as if he had a choice! “I’ll go see what I can see. We’ll need weapons to get out of this.”

  Maybe. Gaspar-shen wondered if they had gone past the need for fighting. In his mind he pictured the tidal wave that had inundated the field at Caer Moray, that had broken against the curtain wall—ah, how beautiful. What passions it had washed away! And he imagined this place, also, flooded, the salt water rushing through the tunnels and caverns like the blood pushing through a human body then receding. He imagined the pressure building until the water found a vent onto the land, and it would wash them out into the sunlight and tumble them down into Cambrent Gap, and down to the ruins of Caervu on the Straits of Alaron, and down into the sea. What would he give, he thought, to set his course out of the Moonshaes and never return?

  Feeling his constraints, he opened his eyes. Lukas had clambered down into the tunnel’s mouth, and he disappeared between the burning rocks. The genasi, as if gifted by the goddess with a vision of the future, imagined himself walking after him, but not into some dark, desiccated passage underground, but into the open air above the sea. He watched himself stumbling down a stony beach, and falling on his knees in the shallow water, and allowing the surf to knock him backward, the seagulls above him, and a rainbow in the spray.

  His experience was not the same as Amaranth’s as she woke up. And yet there was a point of similarity: She had retained a small sharp fragment of her dream, a vestige of a feeling that was comforting for a single moment. She saw herself in her bedroom in Karador when she was a little girl, before her mother had died and Mistress Valeanne had come to take her away, had woken her in darkness. Someone in her dream, perhaps her mother—no, but her mother’s skin was not as dark as that, her hair not as pale—had touched her cheek and neck, had put her lips next to her ear and whispered something she was able to remember when she had come up to the surface of the world and looked around, and vainly tried to struggle against the suffocating ropes. In a moment of claustrophobic panic, she heard a voice whisper to her: “You are as different to these creatures as a man is to a stone. You are like a goddess on this world. Do not let them judge you, for their ideas mean nothing. A thousand years will not wash you away. Your life is not with them. Do not be fooled by any chance resemblance or feeling. Remember this if nothing else.”