Sorrowing Vengeance

by David C. Smith

  Her long legs, shining now in the cool white moonlight and touched by the warm tossing light of the lamps, and her slim belly, barely pushing in and out and shuddering as she breathed, and her breasts, resting now one atop the other as she lay on her side, watching him, and her face that had become so thin and colorless from all her ills—

  His wanderings. The seaports, the pleasure barges. How he had met a man named Guburus who claimed to possess great wisdom, but who had been a sorcerer, and how Guburus had allowed Thameron to be tricked into a compact with an evil entity.

  “But…I’m not evil, Assia.” He wanted her to believe him.

  “Of course you’re not. I know you’re not.” She placed her hand on his leg to touch him and remind him of that.

  Destruction he had caused: he had destroyed a village, taken lives. That was when he had realized that there was a force within him, and that if he did not control it, he would succumb to it, and it would make of him a terrible thing, endless and terrible.

  “I can feel it inside me,” he told Assia. “Another living thing inside me. It pushes at me because it’s trying to escape. Sometimes it feels as if my body is a bubble, straining to burst.”

  His dreams of attaining enormous power, the command of nations, merely exercising this profound illumination and strength he had gained. His dreams.

  “There is a man in a shadowy cave,” Thameron whispered to Assia. “He calls me to him. I don’t want to go, but the earth is moving beneath my feet, nights fall and days come, and every day that passes draws me closer to him. And when I meet him—kingdoms are crushed, I see the sky on fire and the world is buried, and I know that I am responsible for it. The stars tilt and move in every direction—I am making something happen. Whole crowds below me, begging me for things. And people—screaming. I’m not responsible for it, and yet—I am.” Now he stared at her; he saw that she was frightened by what he had said. “Such things could be,” he warned her. “I have bartered with dark spirits—images and memories of ancient races, old wounds of the earth’s. I never intended to, yet my questing led me to them, they chose me, and in ignorance I sought wisdom from a black fountain. Now…I wish I were ignorant again. But I cannot return.” He showed her his hands. “These are signs of evil,” he confessed to Assia, despair in his voice. “They are burned into my flesh and into my soul.”

  He sobbed some more. Assia rose and comforted him, embraced him, and held him close to her. “You are not evil,” she reassured him.

  “But I am. I am.” He grew angry with himself then and gently pushed Assia away. “I have been wounded, and here are the scars. All of us are wounded, all of us bear scars, but where is anyone else with these wounds? I have been wounded more deeply, and my scars are patterned. I’m no longer a man; I am part of something happening in the sky and under the earth and within the stars. Don’t weep for me, Assia.” He stood, walked away from her as though separating himself from her would protect her from him, and he sat in a chair in the shadows. “What is good? What is evil? I have achieved my seat in a place where both are the same. Do I accomplish evil if I believe that what I do is not evil? Where then is the evil?”

  Assia, crouched upon her pillows, watched him and listened to him. This was another voice. Within a heartbeat, could he change so much? Was this proud and arrogant and isolated Thameron the Thameron she loved? Or was this new Thameron something more? Was he speaking truths beyond any other truths she had known? Or was this all deception?

  “I could,” came his voice from the shadows, “destroy all the stars with my strength. And I am led to do so by the powers that conceived me and seek refuge in me and escape through me into the human world. My own heart has been swallowed by another heart, a heart as wide as the night sky, and it is a heart as hungry as shadows are to cover all light with their darkness. I see more in the darkness, Assia, than you can see in the light.”

  She trembled—with apprehension, but also with a kind of fascination. She had heard too much. Assia stood, stretching as she did so; she walked to Thameron with a feline grace, posturing herself. Had her friend changed? She too had changed. For when she knelt before him, it was not in the attitude of a supplicant or a friend, but with the knowing grace, the privileged decisiveness, of a woman of talent kneeling before a man.

  She looked up at him with deep eyes, moist lips, a wondrous expression. She leaned close to him, rested her hands upon his legs, and stared into his shadow-guarded face.

  “What happens in your mind?” Assia whispered to him in a husky voice. “What do you think? What do you know? What do you imagine? How do you make things happen?”

  He touched her hair, felt her face. “You must never know.”

  “Do you, Assia? Truly love me?”

  “So much.… It frightens me.…”

  “It is a door,” Guburus had told him, “that, once opened, cannot be closed.”

  “Slay yourself!” the elder had demanded of him. “What have you become?”

  * * * *

  Later, just as the night began to turn gray and awaken into dawn, Assia, hearing Thameron making sounds, awoke from her sleep. She sat up, wiped her face, and stared at him.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room, behind the fountain. He was enclosed by a circle of burning candles, and his eyes were yellow. He was staring at her.

  Wordlessly, Assia stood and walked to him, passing through shadows, passing through starlight soft at the windows, passing by the tinkling sounds of the splashing fountain, coming into the warm glow of the candle flames.

  Thameron lifted his hands. The candles extinguished them­selves on trails of smoke.

  “Kneel.”

  She did so, nervous and uncertain, unprepared.

  Thameron leaned forward and touched her with his hands, pressed his hands on her body. His hands were warm, almost hot, on her skin. Assia felt his fingers and palms upon her breasts, felt the heat of them seeping into her chest, into her bones, warming the very core of her, touching her spine with their heat. She quickly broke into a sweat. Thameron grunted and moved his hands, hot hands, upon her glossy breasts, now so slick with perspiration that they might have been oiled. He touched her neck and her shoulders, now as wet as all of her was, and he pressed the ribs beneath her breasts to reach into her lungs—

  Assia moaned to him, “What are you doing?”

  Thameron withdrew his hands, lowered his head, and confessed, “I thought I could cure you. I want to cure you.”

  “Oh, Thameron.”

  “I could destroy the stars,” he whispered, head still low. “But I cannot remove this disease from you. Forgive me. I am not—meant—to do that.…”

  * * * *

  In the morning, she dressed in clothes Thameron had purchased for her; Assia had never before worn such attire: a skirt of silk, a blouse of soft jaconet, slippers of cloth-of-gold, a short vest of embroidered samask. He bought her expensive scents, perfumes extracted from rare animals and plants, a purse to wear on her belt in which to carry them, and a parasol of silk by which to guard herself from the heavy sun.

  And in one of the public parks in Abustad where they strolled that morning, Thameron plucked flowers for her, and Assia carried them and wore them in her hair. Other flowers he crushed in his hands, making from them coins of gold, so much gold that they weighted Assia’s purse uncomfortably.

  She stared at him as he dropped the last of the transformed petals into her purse. “Enough, Thameron.”

  His eyes searched hers, an ache deep in him. “I must leave you.”

  “Do not. We can stay together, whatever we are.”

  “I cannot come back to you. Ever. I am evil. There can be no—” He read her eyes and told her, “Remember me as I was.”

  “Oh, Thameron.”

  “Please. Please. And use this money however you will. There is much gold here—use it for yourself. Buy a house, hire servants, employ a physician. Please.”

  She began to weep.

&
nbsp; “If I could make those things appear for you, create them out of the dust, I would do so, instantly. I would have done it by now.”

  She began to cry openly; the colors she had carefully painted around her eyes ran down her cheeks.

  Thameron wiped them away; the colors stained the marks on his palms.

  “But I cannot. For you, my love, I can do good only by not doing evil. Assia—I still love you, but it is another kind of love, now—”

  “Don’t go.” She clutched his arm. “Then…come back to me?”

  “I cannot.”

  They stood in the soft shadows of a flowery cherry tree. The sun warmed them, but then clouds passed before the sun. Birds sang, and far away other people walked—strangers.

  “I cannot come back to you. I want you to forget me, now. Please. Remember…the Thameron who lived with you in Erusabad and was good—full of goodness and eager to serve the world. He was your friend, and he loved you. He loved you. Remember him, and believe in him, but—not in me. Assia…if the world should die—”

  “Oh, gods, Thameron!”

  He threw his arms around her and held her close, embraced her so strongly that he dreamed for a moment that she might never be taken from him. And she held him and sobbed and cried, begged him not to go, begged him to stay with her, because with her he could not be evil, and she would never fear life again, he would never—

  “Thameron.…”

  Her wet eyes, her damp lips sparkling with her own running tears.…

  “Come…back?”

  While in the north, a shadowy figure in a cave watched storm clouds gather and waited for the shadow in his dream to take shape—waited for the end to begin.…

  PART FOUR

  THE RETURN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As the royal galley reefed its sails to make dock at Port Athad, Galvus was surprised to see less activity in the harbor than he had remembered. He and his mother had been gone from the capital for only a little more than half a year; and when he and Orain and Adred had left last autumn for Kendia, it had been commonplace for trading ships, barges, and galleys to drop anchor half a league out from the mouth of the Sevulus and wait sometimes half a day before the congested docks were sufficiently cleared for the next holdful of goods to be unloaded. But such was not the case today. Galvus, Adred and Omos, from where they stood on the foredeck, saw only sixteen ships ahead of them making their way quickly and efficiently to the wharves and the loitering deckhands waiting to unload them.

  When Galvus made comment of this, the Khamar, who was standing nearby, replied tersely, “The economy.”

  Even more appalling for Galvus was the sight of houseboats, ill-constructed rafts, and ramshackle huts that not only crowded the small outlying islets around the mouth of the Sevulus but also filled the alleys and streets behind the shipping docks for as far as Galvus could see.

  “It’s worse here than in Sulos!” he exclaimed.

  As the galley made its way upriver toward the imperial quay, Galvus saw below him hundreds of suffering faces crouched on floating hovels, living in the open sewers beneath the wharves.

  “They’re out of work,” the Khamar told him. “Can’t pay rent in the city, can’t afford to buy food. They have to commit crimes to get by. Or they come down here. More of them every day. They fish to eat, sometimes try to steal from shiploads coming in. You see?” He pointed.

  A thin-faced, hollow-chested man poked his head around the corner of a pile and stared up blankly at the passing royal galley. His left hand was missing; his arm ended in a bony stump.

  “Probably some deckhands caught him trying to take something—them, or some of the patrol. So that’s what he got for it.”

  Galvus watched as the one-handed man moved back under the piles, into the shadows beneath the quay.

  * * * *

  Lord Abgarthis interrupted Elad and Salia’s after-lunch conver­sation to present his king with the dispatches and missives received that morning, and to alert him to the news of the day. Elad made a face when he saw the stack of letters Abgarthis carried with him; as the minister handed them to a servant, the king asked, “What is important in all that?”

  Abgarthis moved to an empty seat beside the Imbur Ogodis and poured himself tea. “A message from Captain Mirsus, sent from Arsol three days ago. Cyrodian remains in custody, and all continues without incident.”

  Elad nodded.

  “Governor Sulen in Abustad reports that the flooding there continues. He suspects that the Emarians have been making greater advances into the lowlands; but our northern border has not been affected, and they have actually made no sightings of either Emarian or Salukadian troop movements.”

  “Excellent.”

  “The flooding, however, has to some extent damaged the spring planting of our own farmers in northeastern Omeria. Sulen may require some relief.”

  Chagrined, Elad shook his head. “With whom did they plead,” he wondered aloud, “when they didn’t have a throne to turn to?”

  Ogodis grunted his approval of that comment; the Imbur of Gaegosh professed a strong belief in self-reliance and let it be known that he considered himself the embodiment of that ideal.

  “Perhaps,” Abgarthis commented, “to whomever might lend them aid.” He ignored the sharp look he received from Elad and continued with correspondence. “There is a long letter from Lord Thomo in Erusabad. Huagrim, the ghen of Salukadia, has died.”

  Elad said, “This is news, indeed.”

  “Not entirely unexpected,” Abgarthis admitted. “Thomo seems convinced that, for the moment, our policies and agree­ments there are not jeopardized. His letter is full of important details.” He suggested that Elad read it at his earliest opportunity. “Thomo thinks it may be wise of us to send a representative to the Salukadian court, to pay our respects to the late ghen’s memory.”

  Ogodis laughed out loud at the foolishness of such a thing, but Elad replied simply, “I shall have to give that matter some careful thought.”

  “But they are savages!” Ogodis complained, smiling with surprise.

  Elad cautioned him, “Savages or not, our businessmen seem to think that their gold is mined the same way ours is. It may not do us any harm to strike an accord with them in this way.” He held up a hand, forestalling anymore of his father-in-law’s opinion. “What else, Abgarthis?”

  The old man smiled as he finished his wine. “Our visitors from Sulos,” he announced, “have arrived.”

  Elad was relieved to hear it. “Orain? And Galvus?”

  Abgarthis nodded deeply. “Safe and whole. Count Adred seems to have accomplished everything that we asked of him. A courier brought me the news just before I left to come here.”

  “Then they are on their way?”

  “Probably in their coach as we speak.”

  “Good.” Elad rapped his knuckles on the table and pushed back his chair. “Good. Good.” He stood and offered his hand to Salia, who took it and gracefully moved around the table to follow him out.

  “Have them taken immediately to their rooms,” the king advised Abgarthis, “and as soon as they have refreshed them­selves and eaten, let me know.”

  “It is done already, King Elad.”

  * * * *

  Abgarthis was present to greet them himself when the four, still accompanied by the ubiquitous Khamar, arrived at the palace. Galvus found more evidence of the government’s stasis and public disaffection as the coach settled still in the yard before the wide, white steps of the southern portico: as he stepped out, the prince noticed large dark smears defacing some of the marble walls close to the street. Dog excrement and horse dung.…

  Orain stood in the courtyard quietly and stared at the palace as though she had never lived there or even seen it before; but when she saw Abgarthis flying as quickly as he could down the stairs, despite his walking stick, Orain opened her arms to embrace him. And Abgarthis hugged her with all the emotion of a father welcoming a lost daughter. He lent Adre
d his hand and shook his arm vigorously, telling the young aristocrat in a voice heavy with meaning, “Thank you, Count Adred. Thank you.”

  “Your instructions, Abgarthis, were…insis­tent?”

  The minister laughed and turned to Galvus. Light filled his face when he saw the young man, for he remembered him as the boy he was when he and his mother left last winter. Clearly Galvus was now involved fully in life, for he had matured quickly. The prince took Abgarthis’s arm and, gripping him proudly, seemed to promise the elder many things with his eyes.

  “You are welcome back, Prince Galvus. You are most welcome back, indeed.”

  “Thank you, Lord Abgarthis.”

  “And who is this young gentleman?” He turned to Omos,

  Galvus introduced him. “My friend—and a friend to the empire.”

  “Welcome,” Abgarthis greeted him, clasping Omos’s hand. “Please feel that you are at your own home, here, with us.”

  “I thank you, Lord Abgarthis.” The youth seemed happy but without a doubt intimidated by all of it: the coach, the palace, the guards—the heart and brain of the empire, here. He had wondered often if such a place actually existed; he was very far indeed from the cold streets of Sulos.

  “Now, come along inside,” Abgarthis urged them all, leading the way up the steps as the coach moved off. To the Khamar: “You have your instructions to report to your commanding officer?”

  “Yes, Lord Abgarthis.”

  “You have done well, Commander. I thank you for it; and all that we promised you will be forthcoming.”

  “Thank you, Lord Abgarthis.” The guard dipped his head, smiled at Orain and Adred, and saluted them as he walked off.

  Adred, wondering, stared at him for a moment before continu­ing up the stairs.

  * * * *

  They were given rooms on the third floor of the east wing—an apartment for each, with sunken bathing pools and fresh clothes and servants at their disposal. As Adred trimmed his beard, he asked the manservant holding his mirror some innocent questions regarding events in the palace during the past few months. The servant seemed reticent to speak and answered the questions cursorily. Adred dressed in a new pair of trousers (a bit too long in the legs for him), a fresh cotton tunic and a plain vest. He pulled on his boots, thanked his servant for his help, and went out, feeling comfortable and invigorated.