Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  If such a creature, mechanical and beast-headed, could be said to think, now it did so.

  Behind it the high walls of the palaces of the kings, which it guarded, had been put from its mind. Instead the consciousness of the Gargolem delved deep into the river. Below the Palest’s frozen surface lay the Insularia of the Magikoy, a complex older than the city. Itself made long ago by their Order, the guardian was privy to the craft of these mages, and its brain now mentally transposed itself into the areas below the ice.

  The Insularia was vast. Reached by several occult entrances, usable only by the Magikoy, it stretched under the river and away on either side. The precise dimensions of it were publicly unknown. Some said the Insularia occupied as much room underground as the city did above, or more. Others believed the Insularia was of quite modest size – no larger, say, than the Great Markets or the temple-town of the Ruk’s army of gods.

  Otherwise the Insularia was not understood. Popular theory said it was, besides being a meeting-place of mages, a secret arsenal of immense terrors.

  As the Gargolem’s thought skimmed through the stone passageways which approached the centre of the complex, it encountered the Magician Thryfe.

  Thryfe was riding in one of the transports which moved through the Insularia. This one was a kind of sledge of brass, elongated and able to carry up to twenty men at once, although only Thryfe now occupied it. A sail of thinnest red vitreous powered the sledge, blown along by one of the conjured winds that could be called in these tunnels. The vehicle travelled quite fast: it was airborne, though only two or three feet clear of the passage floor. There was no light as yet, except for the lamp burning on its mast. This lit the magician’s face, as he glanced aside and into the Gargolem’s inner eye.

  ‘You’re here too, Gargo.’

  ‘I am here, Highness Thryfe.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You are aware of the weight of today’s business?’

  ‘I am.’

  Tall Thryfe, lean and graven, had added ten sober years to his face and lost nothing in doing so. He was an eagle still.

  The Gargolem watched as Thryfe’s transport sailed away down the dark tunnel and, as the guardian took its watchfulness elsewhere, it noted the courteous farewell of Thryfe’s lifted hand.

  Beyond this tunnel, as the mage continued, the passage widened further. An amethyst radiance began, which lit the walls of dressed stone and the high-arching roof. Ahead a vast chamber appeared. It was carved with things of stone, in whose heads cool eyes now turned, gazing down. The sledge sailed into the chamber, through it, and on into another tunnel. Here the lilac light intensified. A stone mound rose abruptly from the floor in the transport’s path, like a small mountain getting to its feet, but the sledge only lifted itself higher, and blew by over the mountain’s head. After which the mound sank away again.

  A chamber opened next which was full of liquid – or seemed to be. It was more a kind of liquid air. This it was which apparently coloured the light. Thryfe sailed across, composed and silent, as the purplish fluid washed over and through him, and was gone.

  A pair of gates, high as the high roof, made of some metal that perhaps was orichalcum, now barred the way. The sledge came to a stop as the conjured wind dropped flat.

  In the blink of an eye, the Gargolem of the Gate grew upwards out of it. It was made of the same metal, and in shape it was like a gigantic worm. Its eyes were cold as water.

  ‘Who comes?’ asked the Worm of the Gate.

  ‘I Read me and let me by.’

  ‘I read you, Highness, and let you by.’

  The gates clashed open like two mailed pages in a book. The Nonagesmian Chamber lay before Thryfe, large indeed as a market, lighted by an unflickering glow as bright as sunshine.

  Nor did any outsider know the number of the mages belonging to the Order of the Magikoy. There were guesses made, particularly concerning the female members, of whom, as a rule, there were few at any time.

  All of the Order, however, had gathered in the Nonagesmian.

  One by one, they ascended the central rostrum and spoke.

  Thryfe sat in his place, his chin on his hand, listening, observing, till it should be his turn. He did not miss a word, although all the speeches were substantially the same. Each of them had beheld the same matter, even if presented in differing, obscure symbols. Each had looked – then lost the sight as a mist veiled the mirrors.

  He knew, Thryfe, all these faces, few younger than his own. He knew all the names. Here and there at the chamber’s upper walls, the furthest from the rostrum, groups of the greatest of the apprentices waited, pale and biting their lips. They would not have to speak. Their time had not yet come. Perhaps now it never could.

  A Magikoy, an old man whose fine white hair fell below his waist, stepped from the rostrum and glided, invisibly aided by uncanny attendants, to his seat.

  Thryfe stood up. It was now his moment to address the chamber.

  He had done this more times than even he could recollect, but never had he done it at such an hour, at such a fearsome pass.

  The eagle which was his otherwise hidden and personal aura flared its stormy wings as he walked down to the rostrum. He felt its claws sink through his heart, then it was still.

  ‘Every one of us,’ said Thryfe, ‘has the same story. What did we anticipate? Every one of us knows. We foresaw the arrival of this thing, and were unable to prevent it. Then and now, it throws a fog around itself. Fate is in league with it. Yet I can tell you what it is.’

  Of them all, he was the first to say this.

  They stared hard-eyed, not doubting him, rather certain, for here no man – even of the Magikoy – could do anything save speak the truth.

  ‘I have seen those signs and images which have plagued us these past ten years. I too have tried to trace their origin and met the obscurity which clouds over every oculum, in this single instance. For me, three nights back, for one second the screen broke wide. It cracked like a plate thrown on the floor. Why? That I don’t know. I’m neither the wisest nor by any means the best of this company. Perhaps for this very reason, then, an irony to inform a man of the middle ranks, neither new nor fully accomplished. Or else it was some accident.’

  They waited.

  Thryfe said, ‘There are three gods – I was shown them. No, they were never clear to me, yet I know them, for I’d long known of the woman who, at her birth, was given to their notice. It was that girl Vuldir sent to the Jafn people, and meant to have killed on the road. That girl the Jafn themselves told us, a few months after, died in giving birth to the child of a Chaiord killed in battle. We know they lied. They cast her out into the ice waste because one of them, Rothger, is a murderer. The kings here know it too, through us, and broke the treaty. But there are other Jafn peoples they can make friends with instead, and they don’t want to go to war over a woman’s death.

  ‘Of course,’ said Thryfe, ‘she didn’t die, Saphay, Vuldir’s daughter. They were her gods I saw. One was dimly present, Ddir, rearranging the clusters of the stars. One was a greyish hound slinking through the snow – Yyrot, Winter’s Lover. The other was Zeth Zezeth, the Wolf of Fire. He it is who has begotten a child in this world, and that child is the clue to the horror which is now rising. He is the Firefex, the Flame-Bringer: mad, invincible, amoral – pitiless.’

  The chamber shuddered. In the false daylight, faces like death gazed back at Thryfe.

  Thryfe said, ‘Still young, this boy: at ten years he is a man of twenty. But he stirs. He is a baby which can hurl lightning, and like a great snow he thunders towards us, fascinated, and sharpening his teeth for the world’s blood. We must resist – but how? He is the son of a god and of a mortal, with the strengths and wickedness of both. His destiny can only be death—or power everlasting.’

  He had been a lamherd’s son. At two years old he had staggered screaming after his mother, trying to hold her back as she went out one morning to break ice for the family water jars. But sh
e pushed him aside, and his father was already gone to tend the lamasceps. Thirty paces from the house, where the cedars stood loaded with ice like prisms, a wolf came from the shadow and tore Thryfe’s mother apart. He had always hated wolves since – worse maybe because at two years old he had already seen, floating there in his drink of milk, the exact prediction – tree, wolf, death – as vividly as he had next seen happening thirty paces away and in reality.

  Later there were other things: things he foresaw and that he could do. At the age of twelve, up on the snow-hills, with the herd grazing in warm channels of dormant grass, he could call eagles, three of them, to come down to him. Ebony and bronze, they fell from the skies. His arms were soon fabulously scarred from the grip of their talons. They helped him guard the herd from the lone black wolves which haunted the hills and killed lamasceps and women gathering ice.

  When he was fifteen, the eagles lifted Thryfe and flew with him. Witnessed by the herder village, this event was the end of his stay there. Afraid of Thryfe by then, his superstitious father could not wait to send him to the nearest town for examination. The envious and adversarial village witch was also keen as a blade to see him go.

  He had the gift of sorcery. The first town knew enough to know that too, and sent him on, via a chain of other towns, towards the cities.

  The process of learning and refining was arduous, and left nothing much of him for anything else. There were ordeals and tests most human things, if they had ever heard of them – though they did not, for they were secret – would have quailed at and fled. Some apprentices did run away, but not Thryfe. He remained and was scorched, melted and remade in the crucible, until he might enter the Order of the Magikoy. After which, presently, the wardenship of the court of Ru Karismi, City of the Kings, was given him. This job, that of instructing nobles and lords, was not among the highest posts, of course. The greatest of the Magikoy worked among ordinary men, sometimes even in remote areas. To serve mankind meant, for the Magikoy, to serve man not king. Nevertheless, Thryfe’s task was exacting.

  He had a life but it was not a life as such – although, for all the Magikoy, male and female, it was like that too.

  As he walked to his under-river lodging, across one of the great obsidian bridges of the Insularia, Thryfe reviewed his situation, but distantly – as though he himself did not belong to him. And he did not, naturally: he was the servant of the people of the Ruk, selected for his role by gods before his birth. Curiously, then, a sentimental stranger, he recalled those snow-hills, the eagles, the long-necked sheep heavy with their wool.

  Sallusdon, King Paramount of Ruk Kar Is, lay dying.

  On every side, the Death-Priests chorused out their chanting to his personal gods, asking that they assist him in the crossing of that vast divide which lay between the physical world and the realms of Paradise.

  But Sallusdon paid little heed; he did not want to die. He wished instead his gods would grant him a reprieve.

  Nearby stood his two queens: Azbeyd, old and colourless with familiarity and distress; and beside her the other, the one he had taken only last year on the advice of Vuldir, King Accessorate.

  Jemhara was lovely and so young, her dark hair, wound with golden ornaments, falling along her back and over her round breasts, which the silk covered deliciously.

  But Sallusdon felt no twinge of desire. He was only terrified. If he had been able to exchange Jemhara, giving her up to some awful fate, to human sacrifice as in antique times, he might have done it to ensure his survival. Luckily she could not be, this young queen, aware of Sallusdon’s inner thoughts.

  Sallusdon turned his head to prove to himself he was yet in his body. And saw, to his chagrin and fright, his third god, Preht, standing between the bed and the Priesthood of Death.

  ‘Are you ready yet?’ enquired Preht.

  ‘Let me live!’ shouted Sallusdon – but not aloud.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Preht. ‘See there – that woman has made certain; on the orders of Vuldir, that you die.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Preht, who was thin as wire, yet glamorous as only a god could be, laughed cruelly. He was in his second aspect, unpleasant and vindictive.

  ‘Look at the slut. How often have you fondled that black hair while her lips were on your body? Was she worth your old man’s joys?’

  ‘Jemhara …’ whispered Sallusdon. This time he articulated, and the girl threw up her hands to her face, weeping glittering perfect tears which, a moment earlier, had seemed not to be in her. One of the Death-Priests restrained her from advancing to the bed. She was only second queen, it was not now her place.

  ‘Remember how sometimes she has made you able to enter her body. Listen well, old fool. First she put a venom into herself – yes, even there, her choicest part. It did her no harm, for she had taken the antidote. But you it ruined. One whole year she has been at work. Vuldir had grown weary of waiting for your natural expiry.’

  Sallusdon cried out. It was vocal now.

  The priests started at the vociferous horror in his voice. They thought he had seen his gods, and that they were predicting for him punishments in the other world. Such a thing must be, from sheer politeness, ignored – for any king had always lived virtuously.

  The haggard Queen Azbeyd, however, stole forward slowly. She took Sallusdon’s wrinkled hand, but he did not see his loving queen, only the unloving one and Preht sneering in the corner, and the night-darkness of death flooding towards him like a Summer-broken sea.

  A few minutes later, Vuldir, King Accessorate, glanced up. Shut in his shrine room alone, ostensibly to offer prayers for the King Paramount, Vuldir had been at other work. No one could enter here unless they knew the magical combination of the door lock. Only he and his mage did so.

  Now, though, someone had come in. Of course, she had not used the door – did not need to. She had arrived, but not in her flesh: it was her physical spirit, exactly like her in every detail, which currently appeared on the mosaic floor.

  ‘Are you not attending the king?’ asked Vuldir, laconic.

  ‘Yes, Majesty Vuldir. I am lying in a dead faint by his death-couch.’

  Vuldir smiled. Jemhara had her own wit, which was not entirely unlike his own. She was one of the few women he had ever come across who could, now and then, amuse him.

  ‘So he’s gone.’

  ‘Howling and pleading to remain – still he must leave.’

  ‘The Ruk mourns.’

  ‘My tears,’ added Jemhara, ‘flow like a river.’

  ‘But the rivers are frozen over, Jemhara.’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘You’re too clever, my dove.’

  ‘Too clever for some. You know I can cry and weep whenever it’s required of me, just as I can unfreeze streams to flow.’

  ‘I know you’re a witch of the backlands near Sofora, who has learned the manners of the court.’

  Jemhara lowered gilded eyelids. She understood well enough when to be silent. It was a fact, she had come from nothing. She possessed mage-skills, but had mostly concealed them under her cream skin, for she did not wish a legitimate career, but rather to further her ambitions through deceit. Coming to Vuldir’s notice by these arts, she was now his servant and instrument. Occasionally they would engage in sexual intercourse, which she did not disenjoy, but also she was wary of him for he, like herself, was a vicious and cold-blooded creature.

  ‘Come here,’ said Vuldir.

  Jemhara’s spirit-body wafted to him. Vuldir showed her, lying on the shrine before his gods, a large black-red ruby. ‘This is for you. I’ll send it you before sundown.’

  ‘You’re most generous, my lord. Won’t your gods miss the jewel?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Vuldir. He offered the altar one flick of a look. He did not believe in gods.

  But Jemhara gazed under her lids at the three beings in the shrine. Two of them she did not recognize, for there were a million and more gods common to the Ruk, and men need only con
centrate on those which were their personal deities. Yet one Jemhara did identify, for he had once been made known to her during her magics. And it was to him, Zeth Zezeth, Wolf of the Sun, that Jemhara’s spirit surreptitiously bowed, before she faded away from Vuldir’s room.

  By then, the palaces were ringing with the dirge for Sallusdon.

  Cold miles off, in a lodge of wood and ice blocks by the fields of ice hemming the sea, the Chaiord of the Jafn Klow sat drinking with his warriors and favourites. Among the latter was numbered the Chaiord of the Kree. Elderly Lokinda was ten years dead, he had died in the same season that saw off Athluan of the Klow. Now Lokinda’s big-eared son, Lokesh, raised the passing cup to his lips.

  The cup was formed from a skull, cleanly scraped, and decorated with hammered silver and white gems. It had eyes made of opals. It was the skull of Athluan, kept by the Klow to honour his memory and his death in battle. The Chaiord alone might drink from it or, at his invitation, his closest comrades.

  Rothger and Lokesh were close comrades. Only they knew how close and interdependent in their plans and kingship – they, and one other. She now sat in the women’s room, up the ladder and over the lodge joyhall.

  The men had been drinking some while, and Lokesh felt inclined to refer to her.

  ‘How’s your lady, Roth?’

  ‘My what? Oh, you mean Taeb, my witch-woman? She’s well, upstairs, combing her long hair with green dye.’

  Lokesh leaned near. He whispered loudly and wet, moistening Rothger’s cheek. ‘How’s she – at the other thing?’

  ‘Which thing is that?’

  ‘You know what I speak of, Roth.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Lokesh drew back. He wiped his mouth and returned the skull-cup to Rothger, Chaiord of the Klow.

  ‘I meant no harm, Roth.’

  Rothger smiled.

  The years had altered Rothger. He had grown heavy and fat. Except when raiders came in from the sea and Rothger rode to intercept them, or if he went hunting as he had today, more often than not he spent his time with drink and food. He was content with what he had won for himself that decade back. But, too, he had secret delights that were spoken of even less than his lack of a wife. They said he coupled with the green witch, Taeb. Certainly he accompanied her to obscure areas to practise unknown rites – but Rothger had always had a knack for magecraft.