by Tanith Lee
Whatever else he had concluded, Erdif did seem to guess who the leader really was of this allied force.
That leader now spoke. From end to end of the battleground, and up on the walls themselves, they heard him.
‘The Klow men, both young and old, kill their true kings, as they let Athluan be killed. The Klow kill women who are mothers, as they would have killed my mother, Athluan’s wife, Saphay of the Rukar. The Klow kill babies, as they would have killed me, Athluan’s son, when I was but a few days born.’
Erdif’s greybearded jaw fell. Aghast he stood there.
Nameless said, ‘I am more compassionate than the Klow, however – but not by very much. I will let your children, up to the age of twelve, live. Your women who are mothers of children below the age of twelve, I will let live also, to care for them. To serve their needs I will let your beasts live. The rest of you shall die, and I will burn your bloody garth. And your cutch of a Klow House I will cave in as if thunder had struck it. Do you hear me, old man? Good, I see you do. Take my words with you to the Other Place.’
As, in the war-sending, a giant hand had flung a sword, now the hand of Nameless flung the sword with which he had slaughtered the vanguard of the Klow.
Before Erdif could protest, or even scream, the sword went straight through him, and, such was the might of the hit, through two elderly others standing bemused behind him. All three collapsed to the snow, already stone dead, and their blood spread from them like an opening rose.
Not a sound now on the earth. Even the wind, they later said, held its breath in wonder and awe.
Then the warriors hurtled out of their trance. They did what Nameless had decreed, without a word of argument. They slew the old men on the plain. They rode headlong up the ramps and crashed in the gates and doors of the garth.
By dusk that evening, the place was peopled mostly by the dead, and it was burning. No Klow men were left alive, a minority only of the women. The mages, who had barricaded themselves in the Thaumary of the House, Nameless himself had gone in to, once the barricade was down. There followed lightnings and shrieks, then Nameless came out from there, but no other.
After this, with the garth and its dwellings and its icon posts in flames around them, Nameless and a chosen few went on into the Klow House, which alone had been left standing.
Five Chaiords were present in the joyhall: the Chaiords of the Shaiy, the Vantry and the Irhon, Lokesh the Chaiord of the Kree, and Rothger who had made himself a Chaiord once, and now sat in iron shackles on the ground.
The dead Klow mages had also been brought in and strewn about. The House Mage, whose neck was crushed, had been propped on a bench. The allies had mocked him, too, seeing how easily their hero had dispatched him and his magic. Right – the right of God – was on a true hero’s side. It was what made him sorcerous, and great.
Nameless did not sit in the Chaiord’s chair – he had offered it to Lokesh. When Lokesh would not accept, Nameless reminded him, ‘You vowed to feast tonight in this Klow House.’
‘So I did.’
‘Sit in the chair, then.’
‘But it must be yours.’
‘I want,’ said Nameless, ‘nothing from the Klow. My friends assembled here, you must keep the Jafn women and children taken today as slaves, and all their goods.’
At this generosity they again demurred, now all four of them, even the Shaiy, exclaiming that Nameless must have most, some, something.
‘So I will have. I will have that one’s death.’
Every eye then fixed on Rothger.
He was awake again, after the concussing punch. He crouched in a venomous frightened shape, biting his flabby mouth. Now he spoke, his tongue still had an edge.
‘What, pray, have I done to earn all this flattering attention?’
No one replied. They knew, for Nameless son of Athluan, and Lokesh, Lokinda’s son, had told them what Rothger had done.
Rothger plucked at the chains. His edged tongue changed its tack. ‘I am not,’ he said, ‘anyway alone, do you think, in being culpable. Ask Lokesh there. Ask him.’
‘Ask Lokesh what?’ demanded the Chaiord of the Vantry, who was tired of this now, wanting to finish up the punishments and get on to the celebration, wherever it was to be.
Outside the high-up windows, fires flicked their manes at the night-falling sky. The smell of smoke was intense.
‘Lokesh,’ insisted Rothger. ‘If I’m accused of anything, then question Lokesh too.’
Lokesh huddled on his bench, appearing smaller than he had been. He glanced at Nameless, seeking a sign. Had he never thought …?
And Nameless simply turned to him two wide eyes, blue as an evening sky that had no fire in it at all. ‘What does he mean, Lokesh?’ Nameless enquired.
Lokesh gaped. He looked as Erdif had, on hearing his death sentence out on the snow – his world had gone mad. ‘I … you know that I …’
Nameless, who had not sat down, moved slowly along the benches where living Chaiords and dead mages rested.
‘My father,’ said Nameless, ‘Athluan …’ He hesitated and stared across at Rothger. ‘What has Lokesh to do with any of that?’
Rothger felt something pulling at his brain, which it had been doing for some little while, coercing it into giving up its store. He was like a man who must vomit, and out it came.
‘Lokesh assisted me in getting rid of Athluan. He lied to help me, and brought me a witch-woman whose spell was more effective than any poison. And in return … well, I enabled Lokesh to see off his own old father, Lokinda. I aided Lokesh so marvellously, I can tell you, that I doubt Lokinda even knew he was dead.’
Nameless had paused by one of the painted hall pillars. Perhaps he recalled this hall, seen while still unborn and also in his baby form, all those ten, eleven years ago; recalled Saphay stranded here, on trial without redress. He did not bother to look at Lokesh gabbling and terrified, or at the other Chaiords growing startled and angry. Nor did he look at Rothger. On Nameless a fierce impatience had come down. He must curb it in order to reach the necessary end. But just as the Vantry chief wanted his supper and cup, Nameless craved the climax of this game. Men were so sluggish, their desires – even their hatreds – so slow to bring to the boil. Yes, even though their lives were short as a sigh.
Behind him, he heard them blustering at each other now, like winds.
Nameless thought, But my life will linger. I am invulnerable. Their weapons go into me and do nothing. I can’t die. Not here, not through mankind.
It seemed to him he had not quite known that before. But he must have known it, too.
Then Lokesh was kneeling, blubbering, on the floor at Nameless’s feet. The abrupt finale to the action surprised Nameless slightly, for he had become bored, thinking they would never get to this point – at least not for a vast while.
‘Brother … Nameless, my friend, you told me …’
Nameless turned from Lokesh and spoke across his prostration at the others. ‘There was an omen – you’ve heard the Kree speak of it. A snake seized a fish, a wolf seized the snake, a crait or other great bird lit on all three of them and bore them off. Now I see,’ said Nameless quietly, ‘that Rothger is the snake who seized Lokesh the wriggling fish, and made him his dupe and accomplice. But we, you and I, we are the wolf that grasps the snake and the fish together.’
‘And the great bird,’ said the Irhon Chaiord, ‘what is that?’
‘That is God,’ said Nameless, ‘in whose Grip we are.’ He kicked Lokesh aside and went back to the others. ‘Fetch in the Kree. Let them judge him, this Lokesh. I can’t do it. How could I do it?’
The Kree came. They judged. Rothger spoke slyly on and on. Lokesh jabbered, weeping, and as wet with sweat as if he had been bathing.
Outside the red flames sank till the sky was black.
When they had decided, they asked Nameless to choose a fate for Rothger and for Lokesh, both.
‘Your father died through these men.’
‘Yes,’ Nameless said. Some wine had been brought by then. He drank, and threw away the cup of black jade, which had once been Athluan’s, and which Rothger had soiled with his lips. It shattered.
Only three now, alone together in the deserted Klow House: Rothger, Lokesh, Nameless.
Lokesh suddenly laughed. Both the others, Rothger and even Nameless, glanced at him, arrested.
‘It’s your joke with me, brother,’ said Lokesh to Nameless. ‘I see it now: you won’t kill me.’
‘No,’ said Nameless, ‘not I.’
Lokesh stopped laughing. He had ceased to be a total fool. He stared at the floor where his own Kree warriors had thrown him, kicking him in the guts, the ribs, and pissing on him. ‘I loved you,’ he said to Nameless.
Then it was Rothger who barked out a tiny laugh. ‘Love?’ said Rothger. ‘He gets plenty of that. His kind are used to it.’
Lokesh spoke his curse. ‘Let love ruin him, then,’ he said.
But Nameless paid no attention. He was putting out the last of the lamps left in the joyhall. He had no need of lights – could see, it seemed, in the dark.
That done, he got hold of Lokesh, who was partly broken, and lifted him with ease and dumped him next to Rothger. Also, to where Rothger might reach it, Nameless kicked one of the shards of Athluan’s wine cup.
‘You know my Uncle Roth is a vampire?’ Nameless asked. ‘Yes, for you and many of his men have seen him at it. Well, Uncle Roth’ – and his voice when he spoke the word ‘Uncle’ – ‘here’s a present for you. Your seef will come, or if it won’t, the mages will make sure that other seefs do come in. Seefs and sihpps of all sorts, the blood-drinkers by proxy. Even like this, they’ll want you to do it, Uncle Roth. Perhaps they’ll even promise to set you at liberty if you fill them full. Rest assured, I will make certain also that they can’t. But you, you’ll have to drink this one’s blood. You’ll drink him dry. And that, Lokesh, is your feasting here – to be feasted on.’
Lokesh made the smallest sound, as he had when his snapped ribs grated. Then he lay back and turned his head from both these terrors.
Rothger, incredibly, attended to hear what came next. Seeing that, Nameless obliged him.
‘When Lokesh is drained, there’ll be no one left to consume but yourself.’
Over Rothger’s swollen face ran, hand in hand together, a look of sheer blind horror and a look of irresistible desire.
No, he would not be able to refuse.
All would be as Nameless said.
‘This garbage heap can stand,’ said Nameless, ‘till you’re done. Then some mage or other can call a couple of winds to knock it down. Not one brick on another.’
As he walked, unseen in darkness, from the hall, Rothger and even Lokesh, whose head stayed turned away, watched him somehow.
Only night was now in that place – and waiting. But for them neither night nor wait continued very long.
Behind the festive Jafn camp, Guri met his adoptive nephew, Nameless, in the hour before sunrise.
‘So you didn’t need me, not once,’ said Guri. ‘I’m good only for impersonating old dead Chaiords, or upsetting buckets.’
Astonished, Nameless gazed at him. ‘But—’
‘No, I was glad of a bit of peace. I’m not complaining.’ Guri sat by Nameless on a snow-bank and squinted at the bright torches and fires below. He despaired over the profligacy of the fire, so unlike the abstemious war camps of Olchibe. He believed he had not minded being left out of the action, though possibly ten mortal years ago he would have done. Nameless must take his own way; Nameless was the Leader.
Nameless—
‘One thing,’ said Guri. ‘One or two.’
‘Which are?’
‘Where next for you?’
‘Oh,’ said Nameless, ‘the remainder of the Jafn, all those other clans, I’ll call them in, get hold of them.’
‘Yes, that’s right. That’s the way.’
‘Gech, too,’ said Nameless, bragging now, how strangely, a boy to his uncle – bragging, he. ‘And Olchibe, Uncle, what do you think? Will Olchibe and Gech have me, too?’
‘Maybe,’ said Guri seriously, ‘but not as you are now.’
Affronted – you could see it – Nameless glared.
Guri put back his braids and chortled. ‘I mean, not by that name.’
‘Which name?’
‘Nameless.’
‘What else do I have?’
‘Poor lad. No dada to title you. Listen, I’m your uncle, ah? Shall I name you then?’ Guri got up. He raised his hands as high as his shoulders, palms out-turned, as he had sometimes seen Peb do when he was being the priest of his band. ‘The Great Gods anyway prepared a name for you. Amen. I even part-called you by it, not understanding, once or twice when you were a kiddle. Don’t you recall? No, you wouldn’t now.’
Nameless looked at Guri with all his eyes.
A child, a child with a new toy—
Well, he had spared all the children, up to twelve years, as Peb Yuve would have done.
‘There was an omen, when we were out in the snows, you and your mother and me. Do you remember that? No? You were a baby, and the fey-sight you’d had was fading.’
‘What was the name?’
‘Gently, it’s your old uncle you’re talking to. There’s a legend in Gech: a wolf that mates with a lion. It makes a creature that’s holy yet profane, a beast of destiny and magic power.’
Guri had lowered his hands. His charge stared at him.
‘Is that what I am?’
‘Great Gods know, amen, what you are. You’re a fine man – but your father was a Rukar deity. You know he was, a filth-god full of wickedness and spite.’
‘Guri, he might—’
‘Hear me? No, he doesn’t hear. Believe me, I think now that I’d know. Why he doesn’t is a mystery. After all, even with his faults, he is a god. He shone and glowed with superlativeness. Let him hear me say that. And you are half of him and half your mother, who is a human woman. That night we were all out on the waste, I saw the lion mating in the sky with the wolf. Her, she saw it too – Saphay. She caused the image to come; she’d thrown some mage-coal in the fire. I found it after. See, here it is.’
Guri put the ancient coal, dehydrated and meaningless as a fossilized turd, into his nephew’s grasp. The young man sat staring at it. ‘I never heard that legend,’ said the unlessoned son of the god. Time hovered, till eventually he remarked, ‘We should think about Saphay. I should send to her in some way or other.’
‘If you like. But first—’
‘First the name. What?’
‘What you’d suppose,’ said Guri, shrugging.
Nameless said nothing. Guri said nothing.
Overhead, the stars, about to be helplessly snuffed out by dawn, spangled defiance for a moment on the arc of sky.
Below in the camp the Jafn sang, and bellowed occasionally for their beloved brother and Borjiy, who had vanished from their midst.
‘I’ll be king,’ the young man said, ‘over them all.’ He spoke now remotely, lost in himself. He added, ‘I am Lionwolf.’
FIVE
Fearful, the dream.
Worse, because it went on even after her eyes were open. Now she saw it reflected in the floor.
An oval of night sky was held in a rim of faintest flame. Across the upper blackness curled long pale tendrils. She saw into them as, while still asleep, she had also done. Figures writhed and mouthed in the whiteness. She did not know, never having seen them in her waking or sleeping life before, what they were, and yet she suspected they were elemental demons of the Jafn. Athluan had once described several of these minor fiends to her. Seefs – they were seefs.
Through the high windows of some tall building they flowed like rivers of dirty milk.
It was the Klow House from which she had been exiled, and all around it the Klowan-garth lay in burnt-out rubble, like a used-up fireplace.
The vision faded without pr
elude.
Saphay pushed herself into a sitting position.
She was abysmally cold, for here all the heating was gone – and had been for some while. She did not know how she had survived, eating the little raw shared dinners her cat provided, both of them huddled in their furs.
The rest of the village-city of Ranjalla was deserted. On her forays up and down, she had found no one there. The houses were icy, only the ice kept them in repair. Saphay believed that similarly only her hardiness, learned from her former trek across the snow waste, kept her in repair now. Additionally, she had once come back from icy death, so perhaps she always could.
But this cold was omnipresent and dire. It made her sluggish, and brought on a sort of muddled depression in which thoughts seldom stirred – and no dreams until now.
Saphay saw that where she had beheld the dream in the floor was exactly the spot where the god Yyrot had received the frozen solid puddle of offering beer. Sometimes since she had chipped pieces out with a knife, to suck and cheer herself, but it failed to work now. It had no taste or alcoholic worth. How long had she been here? She could not make up her mind.
The cat lay in her lap for warmth. Saphay stroked the cat. A sudden enchanting heat seemed to come up from its coat. Saphay put both her hands on it, but then she felt the heat blooming also at her back.
Some miracle. The stove must have relit itself by magical means. Had Guri at last deigned to call on her, or her heartless, abandoning son?
Saphay uncoiled and rose, the cat on one arm, ready to slap either of these two precious men across the face.
However, it was neither of them. Her spirits evaporated.
‘You again,’ she said.
She stood her ground, insolent with the derangement of near cryoanaesthesia.
Yyrot, Winter’s Lover, had evolved at the other side of the snow-house room. He was not, today, clad in ice-mail. Sparks came and went in his black hair. His face was darker, wind-burned, it looked, as Athluan’s had done when he had been out hunting. The grey eyes of the god were cloudy. He seemed slightly drunk.